Home > SI 2015 Documentation > Implementation Guides > Implementation Guide I > Catalog Setup

Catalog Setup

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There are numerous ways to build your Catalog. The Catalog is your library of items: Products, Labor Items, and Packages. The first step is to gather a list of the products that you sell. Try to make this list as concise and accurate as possible, e.g. don't add products you no longer use. One method of narrowing down this list is to use the tools (queries, reports) available to you in your previous estimating software to find out what products you've used in the last year. However you gather this list, it is important to get it in a CSV (comma separated values) formatted spreadsheet. 

 

The intent here is not to import the products into SI 2015 as new, but rather use this spreadsheet to import your current pricing once you've downloaded/created the Products in SI 2015. These are the suggested columns/fields to have in your spreadsheet:

 

Manufacturer, Model, Unit Cost, and Unit Price

 

The next step is to decide how you want to get this data into your Catalog. You can download Products from D-Tools or you can manually enter Products. You can also import the spreadsheet you've already created, and while this sounds like the easiest method, there are many more fields populated in the D-Tools Library that you will likely want to take advantage of, e.g. Thumbnail image, Specifications, Inputs/Outputs, etc. It is best to try download everything you can, then use spreadsheets (CSV files) for setting/updating pricing. It is likely that you will use a combination of these methods to populate your Catalog.

 

The most important thing to realize is that your Catalog will constantly be changing/evolving. You will change/add product lines, products will reach end of life, and of course pricing is constantly changing. Don't feel that you have to stop everything just to build your entire Catalog before you begin creating Estimates. Focus on adding your most frequently used products and of course any products you intend use on your first Estimate in SI 2015.

Downloading from D-Tools

 

The first place you should start when building your SI 2015 Catalog is to download from D-Tools.

 

 

 

Manually Entering Items

 

This video will demonstrate manually adding a Product and a Bulk Wire to your SI 2015 Catalog.

 

 

 

Creating Labor Items

 

This video will demonstrate creating Labor Items in your SI 2015 Catalog. Labor Items are one method for adding labor to a Project, the other being Phase labor assigned to each Product. The video for setting up Phases is on the previous step.

 

 

Importing Pricing

 

This video will demonstrate importing a CSV file into SI 2015 for the purpose of updating pricing.

 

 

Topics Covered

 

The following links provide additional information on the topics covered in these videos:

 

Downloading Products

Manually Entering Items

Creating Labor Items

Importing Pricing

 

 

 

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