Almost everything in HomePulse is built from three things. Once you understand what each one is and how they connect, the rest of the system follows.
The short version
Areas are the places in the build. A bedroom, a kitchen, the exterior, the wet areas. However you choose to divide up a house, those divisions are your areas.
Selections are the decisions your client has to make. Which tap goes on the basin, which benchtop goes in the kitchen, which tile goes on the bathroom floor. Every one of those is a selection.
Items are the actual products. A specific tap, with a brand, a price, an image and a supplier behind it. Your item catalogue is your product library, and it is what every selection draws from.
Put them together and you get the sentence that describes the whole system: in each area, your client makes a set of selections, and for each selection they choose from a shortlist of items.
How they fit together on a real job
Say you are building a four bedroom home in Armstrong Creek, and the clients have just signed.
Your areas might be Kitchen, Main Bathroom, Ensuite, Bed 1 through Bed 4, and Exterior. These are the places your clients will walk through mentally when they picture their build, and they are the way the portal navigation will be organised for them.
Inside the Main Bathroom, the selections are the decisions that have to be made in that room: floor tile, wall tile, basin, basin tapware, shower mixer, shower screen, towel rail and vanity. Eight decisions, and until they are all made you cannot order the bathroom, your tiler cannot start and your plumber does not know what he is fitting.
For the basin tapware selection, the items are the actual taps on offer. You might present three: a chrome mixer included in the contract, a matte black option at $50 extra, and a brushed brass at $70. Each of those is a record in your catalogue with a photo, a description, your cost and a supplier attached to it.
Your client opens their portal on a Sunday night, works through the Main Bathroom, gets to Basin Tapware, sees three taps with photos and prices, and picks the matte black. That pick is recorded against that selection in that area, and their running upgrade total moves by fifty dollars.
That choice lands immediately on the job's Chosen Selections screen, and there is nothing for you to confirm or accept. It is the same record your cost rollups, your reports and your purchase orders all read, so the moment your client picks something you can order from it.
What the Chosen Selections screen adds on top is the procurement layer that your client never sees: quantities, notes for your supplier, and warnings telling you a line is not ready to order yet. That is the screen you work from when it is time to buy. Reviewing and adjusting what your client chose covers it.
Why the separation matters
It would be simpler to have one big list of products per house, and plenty of builders run their selections exactly that way in a spreadsheet. It works right up until it does not.
The reason HomePulse keeps areas, selections and items apart is that each one changes at a different rate and for a completely different reason. Your areas change when you build a different house type, which might be twice a year. Your selections change when you change what you offer as standard, which might be once a year. Your items change constantly, because suppliers discontinue products, prices move every quarter and new ranges land whether you asked for them or not.
Keeping them separate means a price rise from your tapware supplier is one edit in your catalogue rather than forty edits across forty spreadsheets. It means adding a fourth bathroom to a house type does not mean retyping every bathroom decision. And it means your client sees a photograph of the actual tap instead of a line of text in a schedule.
The two supporting concepts you will meet immediately
There are two more terms you will see on your first setup screen, and they are important to take note of.
Area Types are the categories your areas belong to. Bed 1 through Bed 4 are all areas of the type Bedroom, and Main Bathroom and Ensuite are both areas of the type Bathroom. You define the type once and then define the decisions that apply to every area of that type, instead of repeating yourself room by room.
Selection Types are the categories your selections belong to, and the categories your product shortlists are keyed to. Tapware, Flooring, Stone, Tiling, Electrical. A selection type is what connects a decision to the right set of products, so that when a client opens Basin Tapware they see taps and not benchtops. Note that individual items in your catalogue are not tagged with a selection type, since that connection is made when you group products together on a job.
These two are the real control levers in HomePulse. Read Area Types and Selection Types: the two axes that control everything next.
What to do next
If you are setting up for the first time, go to Area Types and Selection Types and then straight into Your first 40 minutes, which walks you from an empty account to a working client portal in one sitting.
If you would rather understand what your client experiences before you build anything, read What your client sees when they log in first.
Related articles
Area Types and Selection Types: the two axes that control everything
What a Selection actually is, and what a shortlist does
How upgrade pricing works
The glossary