Your item catalogue is the product library behind every selection your clients make. This guide gets you to enough items to see the client portal working properly, which takes about fifteen minutes.
Already have a price list or product library?
If your products are already in a spreadsheet, a supplier price list or another system, do not type them in by hand. Send the file to us and we will load it into your account for you.
What we work from is a CSV with one product per row. The columns we can read are name, description, brand, unit, price, colour, finish, width, height, depth, SKU, URL, category and supplier. If your file is in a different shape, send it anyway and we will tell you what we need.
Send your product photos at the same time. If you have a folder of images named by SKU, we can attach them to the right items in bulk, which saves attaching four hundred images by hand.
The rest of this guide covers adding items by hand, which you will still want to do for one-off products, new releases and anything a client turns up with.
Start small and deliberately
You do not need your whole catalogue to see HomePulse work. For a first session, about twenty items covering two product types is plenty. Pick your tapware and your flooring, or whichever two you know best, and add a handful of options in each.
The item form has a Categories field, and it is not what connects a product to a decision. Categories are your own filing system for finding things in your library, so you might tag a tap as Tapware, Bathroom and Meir, and then filter on any of those when you are hunting for it later.
What connects a product to a decision is the selection type, and that happens when you add the item to an item group. Items themselves carry no selection type, which is what lets the same tap sit in a Tapware group on one job and a Basin Tapware group on another.
Where to find it
Items in the main sidebar. The index has a layout toggle so you can view your catalogue as a table or as a grid of cards, and the card view is better while you are building the library, because it shows which products are missing images.
The item form has two tabs, Details and Images & Docs. Everything below is on Details unless it says otherwise.
The fields, and which ones matter
These are the ones with consequences.
Name. What your client sees. Write it the way a homeowner would recognise it, not the way it appears on a supplier invoice. "Meir Round Basin Mixer, Matte Black" reads properly to a customer, "MB-BM-RD-01-MB" reads as a mistake. It is also the fallback your supplier sees if you leave the PO description blank.
Description. Shown in the client portal when they open the product, so a sentence or two on what it is and why someone would choose it.
Supplier. Which company you buy it from.
The company has to be typed as a Supplier when you create it, because companies typed Entity or Service Provider do not appear in this list at all. And an item with no supplier cannot go onto a purchase order, so fill this in on anything you expect to order.
PO Description (optional). This is the supplier-facing description that appears on the purchase order line, so your client can see "Meir Round Basin Mixer, Matte Black" while your supplier sees the code and language they actually order by.
Images. On the Images & Docs tab, and the most important field in the record. You can add several images per item, each categorised as front view, side view, installed, detail, dimensions or lifestyle, and you drag them into order. The first one is marked as the primary image and is what appears on the card, so lead with your best shot. PNG or JPG up to 5MB each.
Internal cost. What the product costs you. Builder-only, and never appears anywhere in the client portal. It drives your job cost rollups and becomes the unit price on purchase orders.
Unit. How you buy it. The options are Ea for each, m² for square metre, m³ for cubic metre, Lm for lineal metre, Kg, and T for tonne.
Categories. Your own tags for organising the library, described above. Not client-facing, and not connected to selection types. Worth using, because both your library search and the picker you use when adding items to an item group can filter on them.
SKU, brand, URL, colour, finish, and height, width and depth. Reference and filtering.
Finish, worth filling in because your client can filter by it when browsing a long shortlist, alongside a filter by supplier.
Brand, worth filling in because their search box looks at it, along with the name and the description.
Dimensions, three separate boxes rather than one field, which HomePulse joins for display.
Warranty period and warranty type. Manufacturer, supplier or builder, and how long for. Useful at handover.
Specification documents
On the Images & Docs tab you can attach PDFs and Word documents to an item, categorised as specification sheet, installation guide, warranty document, product brochure or other, up to 10MB each.
These are visible to your client. A Documents tab appears on the product in their portal whenever the item has at least one document attached, listing each one by its category, and they can download them.
Trade price lists, internal notes and supplier correspondence do not belong on an item record. If you have a document you need to keep to yourself, attach it to the job instead, where you control what is shared.
What to do next
You now have areas, selection types and products. Creating a job is the next step, or Your first 40 minutes runs the whole sequence end to end.
Related articles
What makes a good item record
Adding item images that sell
Loading your existing price list
Adding suppliers and service providers
How upgrade pricing works