Products

A product is a specific thing you buy: a particular tap, a particular tile, a particular window. Where a price list item is “chrome basin mixer”, a product is that mixer, with its part number and its supplier.

Products hang off price list items. Each item can have any number of them, and a product can be linked to more than one item.

Two ways to see them

Under the item. Click an item and the drawer’s Products tab lists its products, with Add product to create one against it.

The Products view. The Products switch at the top of the page shows the products on every item under the cost code you have selected — pick All items for the whole list. A supplier dropdown in the toolbar narrows it to one supplier, with counts, or to Not linked to an item for products no item uses. Search matches SKU, product and supplier. Double-click a cell on one of your own products to edit it in place; click a row for its drawer. Columns adds Finish, Colour, Material, Profile and Size to the grid, and they edit in place like the rest.

Group by item is on by default: the rows sit under the price list item each one is filed under, in alphabetical order, with a count on each band and products filed under no item at the bottom. Click a band to fold that item away. Turn the button off for one flat list. The setting is remembered, and selecting a range with Shift picks the rows you can see between the two you clicked.

Click a column heading to sort by it — supplier, SKU, product, price, category, price list item, or any column you have added. Click again to reverse it, a third time to go back to the list’s own order. Grouped, the sort runs inside each band and orders the bands themselves, so sorting by price puts the dearest item at the top with its dearest product first. Your choice of column is remembered. Dragging a column’s right edge still resizes it and leaves the sort alone.

A product filed under more than one item is listed once, under the first of them — the same one the Item column has always shown. To see everything that is filed under an item, open the item and use its Products tab.

The fields

Field	What it is
Product	What the product is
Description	The fuller wording
Supplier	Who you buy it from
SKU	The supplier’s part number
Manufacturer / Manufacturer code	Who makes it, and their code
Price	What it costs — ex GST; tick inc GST if the figure you are typing includes it
Price list item	The item it belongs to
Category	An optional grouping among that item’s products from that supplier
Finish, Colour, Material, Profile	The variant details that tell one product from its near-identical siblings - they also feed colour selections
Size	The product’s size, where it matters
Product URL	Link to the supplier’s page
Note	Anything worth recording
Superseded	Marks a product the supplier has replaced, without deleting the history

Why the SKU matters

It prints on the purchase order.

A supplier receiving a part number does not have to interpret your description, which is where substitutions and wrong deliveries come from. It matters most on anything with variants — tapware, tiles, hardware, appliances, anything with a finish or colour.

“Chrome mixer” is not an order. A SKU is.

Pictures and URLs

A picture and a URL are what make a selections schedule work.

A client choosing tapware wants to see it. Attach the picture once and every colour selection schedule from then on shows it; the URL lets them look at the supplier’s own page for the detail.

In the product’s drawer, under Details, the Picture section has Upload for a file from your computer and From web address to fetch one from a link. Remove takes it off again. Pictures count towards your company’s storage.

Pictures earn their keep in selections

The time to add a picture is when you add the product, not when a client asks what something looks like. It is a minute per product and it turns the selections process from a series of phone calls into a document the client works through themselves.

Adding, linking and duplicating

New product in the Products view, or Add product in an item’s drawer, creates one. The form asks for the supplier and the price list item; start typing in the item box to find it.

From a product’s drawer:

• Link attaches it to another item as well, so the same tap can sit under two items without being entered twice. The Linked to section lists every item it is on, each with an unlink icon.
• Duplicate copies it, which is the fast way to add a variant — the same tap in a different finish. It is also how you take on a product SmarteBuild supplies: the copy belongs to your company, so you can price it, rename it and file it where you like.
• Edit and Delete do what they say. Deleting a product removes it from every item it is linked to.

Select several products and the bar at the bottom can mark them Superseded or Current, Unlink them from the item you are looking at, or Delete them.

Editing a whole list at once

When an item carries a dozen products, opening each one to change a price is slow. Edit all on the item’s Products tab opens every product of that item in one grid, with a column for each field: product, supplier, SKU, description, price, manufacturer and code, finish, colour, material, profile, size and superseded.

• Type straight into any cell. Changed cells are highlighted, and the button at the bottom counts what you have changed — Save 6 saves those six products in one go.
• Search and the supplier dropdown narrow a long list; the dropdown offers only the suppliers that item actually has, with how many each one carries.
• Click a column heading to sort by it, and again to reverse it.
• Searching or filtering never loses an edit. A changed row the filter is hiding is still saved, and the footer says so — 3 products changed (1 not shown).
• Enter jumps down the same column, so a price list can be priced top to bottom without reaching for the mouse.
• Tick Prices I type include GST and every price you type in that grid is the GST-inclusive one; SmarteBuild stores the price without GST, as everywhere else.
• Products SmarteBuild shares with every company are shown with a padlock and cannot be changed, the same as anywhere else.
• Nothing is saved until you press Save, and a price change is added to that product’s price history exactly as it is when you edit one product.

Categories

Products linked to one item from one supplier can be grouped — Cement, Aggregate and Additives under a concrete item, say. The Category box on the product form lists the ones that exist for that item and supplier; type a name beside it and Add to create one, or use the pencil and bin icons to rename or delete the selected one. Deleting a category leaves its products uncategorised; it does not delete them.

Most products do not need a category. Use them where one item has a dozen products from the same supplier and the list is getting hard to read.

Your own price on a product

Products supplied with SmarteBuild are read-only, but you can record your own price against one exactly as you can for an item — the drawer’s Prices tab keeps the history, and shows SmarteBuild’s own price changes too, locked. See Keeping rates current.

Products on BOQ items

An item can name the product it was priced with, so the purchase order carries the part number. See Suppliers and products.

Housekeeping

Two commands worth knowing, from the BOQ’s Items menu:

• Remove all unused products clears products no item on that estimate refers to. Worth running after heavy editing — orphaned products clutter the pickers without affecting any price.
• Export all products produces the buying list for a job, which is useful for a supplier who wants to quote the package rather than line by line.

On the Price lists page, the Not linked entry in the Products view is the equivalent check for the list itself.

What to put in

Products you specify repeatedly. Your standard tapware range, the tiles you use, the door hardware, the appliances you offer as standard.

A one-off product a client found themselves does not need to be here — put it on the BOQ item and move on. Products are for what recurs.