By the end of this guide your job will have areas, a set of decisions in each of them, and a shortlist of products against each decision.
Before you start
You need area types, areas and selection types set up in Settings, and some items in your catalogue. If none of that is in place, start with Creating your Area Types and Areas.
If you already have templates built, do not follow this guide. Load them instead, which does everything below in about ninety seconds. Cloning templates into a job is the one to read, and you come back here when you need to adjust something on an individual job.
Where to find it
On the job, open the Selection Settings tab. There is a second row of navigation inside it with three sections, and you work through them in this order:
Areas, the places in this build
Selection Groups, the decisions to be made
Item Groups, the products available to choose from
Everything on these screens happens in place. Groups expand and collapse rather than opening their own page, and every edit is a small dialog over the top.
Step one: add your areas
Open Areas. Down the right of the screen is a panel headed Areas, listing your account library with a search box above it. Each entry shows the area name with its type underneath and an Add button beside it.
Type into Search areas... to narrow the list, then click Add on each place that exists in this build. You are picking from the library you built in Settings rather than typing new names, so if something is missing it has to be created there first.
Drag them into order once they are in. The order you set here is the order your client sees in their portal navigation, so arrange them the way a person would walk through the house.
Step two: build your selection groups
Open Selection Groups. Down the side you will see your area types, each with an Add button. Clicking Add on Bathroom creates a bathroom selection group.
There is no name to enter. A selection group is identified by its area type, so the group shows as Bathroom with a count of the decisions inside it. One group per area type is the shape the system expects.
Now add the decisions. Expand the group and use Add a selection for each one. For a bathroom that is typically floor tile, wall tile, basin, basin tapware, shower mixer, shower screen, towel rail and vanity. Each selection needs a name and a selection type, and the selection type is what connects it to the right products later.
Step three: attach your item groups
An item group is a shortlist of products sitting on this job, keyed to exactly one selection type. It is what your client browses when they open a decision. When they open Basin Tapware, HomePulse checks that selection's type, finds the item group on the job with the matching type, and shows them those products. So if this job has selections of the types Tapware, Tiling, Stone and Flooring, you need four item groups on it, one for each.
The groups sit in a sidebar and the one you select fills the panel beside it, so you work through them without leaving the screen. Four actions, repeated for every selection type in use:
Create the item group and choose its selection type. One group per type: Tapware, Tiling, Stone, and so on.
Add the products with
Add Item, searching and selecting as you go.
Set an upgrade price on each one.
Drag them into order, with your standard inclusion first.
The upgrade price is what your client pays on top of their contract for choosing that product, so leave your standard inclusions blank. Only products above zero show a price badge in the portal, which is how your client tells an inclusion from an extra without needing you to explain it. Putting the inclusion first matters because it is the anchor everything else gets compared against.
Price on Application. Alongside the upgrade price there is a Price on Application (P.O.A.) checkbox, for anything you cannot put a number against until you have quoted it. Tick it and your client sees a P.O.A. badge in place of a price, with a note that you will confirm it. Those items stay out of their running upgrade total, and the total panel shows a separate line counting how many P.O.A. items they have chosen.
Every selection type you have used needs a group. If a selection has no matching item group on the job, the product screen does not load at all for your client, so this is not a cosmetic gap.
One thing to keep in mind as you build them. A group serves every decision of its type, so a tighter Tapware group narrows every tapware decision in the house at once. If you want one room to get a different range from another, split the selection type rather than the group. Choosing your selection types: broad or granular covers when that is worth doing.
Reordering
Everything here can be dragged into order: areas, selection groups, selections within a group, and items within a group. All of it flows straight through to the client portal.
The much faster way
Doing all of this by hand on every job is exactly the work templates exist to remove.
Build an item template once, holding your standard item groups for every selection type you use, and load it into each new job. That turns ten pieces of setup into one action, and it means a price change or a new range gets updated in one place rather than on every live job. Building an Item Template walks through it, and Combining templates to produce a working selections portal shows the full three-template combination that sets a job up in about ninety seconds.
What to do next
Check how it appears to the client. The best way to do this is via the Presentation view, which mimics the selections view in the Client Portal.
If you need to stop your client changing an area later, the per-area lock on the Chosen Selections tab is the tool for that, explained in What your client sees when they log in.
Related articles
Area Types and Selection Types: the two axes that control everything
Attaching item groups so products appear
Cloning templates into a job
Three ways to define your areas, and what each one costs you
My client cannot see the products I added