Product Catalog - QPro Setup (Part 6)

Licia Bailey, QPro Director of Engineering - Web Products
April 2023

As a continuation of previous QNews’ articles (you can access them via the links below), in this series we are providing helpful tips on setting up QPro for your business. After completing the setup of Company, Locations, Employees, Sales Tax, Sales Tax Table, Product Types, Labor Types, Customer Accounts, Vendor Accounts, and the Contact Manager, next comes the Product Catalog.

Product Catalog Overview:

The product catalog is one of the most important parts of QPro because so many things depend upon the product catalog when you're doing a customer bid, a sales order, a purchase order, or even inventory. All of those things depend upon products that are found in the product catalog.

It is very important that the person or people that are managing this part of the program are very detailed, knowledgeable, and responsible in the way that they create and maintain the product catalog. If you aren’t careful about who has access and the type of people that have access to create and edit products, you’re going to end up with duplicate products and a lot of things that would be very hard to find. This can become very frustrating and a big mess to clean up.

On our training site there is a page called Recommended Description Name Patterns. If you click on “Description Name Patterns” there's a document that gives some recommendations on how to name things such as your roll, soft goods, hard surfaces, etc., as well as strategies you should implement when it comes to naming and choosing the description for a product.

In the video below we will show you how you can accomplish manually setting up a product in the product catalog, and searching the product catalog.

In a future article coming soon we will go through the B2B process. You can still view the B2B training video for QPro1 here.

Terms and Fields in the Product Catalog

In the Product Catalog video embedded above, we go into more detail about the following items:

A product in QPro is defined by three different parameters:

The Manufacturer
The Description (Style) – the list of descriptions or styles that go along with a specific manufacturer
The Color – the list of colors that go along with a specific description (style)

"Export catalog" button: This will export to a CSV file all of the descriptions and colors that are associated with the manufacturer that is currently selected. You must select a manufacturer for this to export data.

“Export Price List” button: This will export the price list to a pdf.

The “Short Name” field is very important and is used in other parts of the program. Some manufacturer names might become very long so we allow you to put in a two or three letter description so that it has a shorter name that will be visible elsewhere.

The “Product Type” field is required, the “Pricing Units'' field is required and the “Width/Qty Per Carton” field is often required, especially for rolled goods and for things that come in boxes. In general, these are all the main pieces of information that are required.

“Unique Identifier” field: This is a unique number similar to an SKU number but at the description (style) level. It is also for the fcB2B world where this identifier is used to update a group of colors all at one time.This field is important when doing electronic updates through fcB2B.

“Description Number” field: This is not required and can be another identifier.

“Private Label” field: Some operations require private labels. This can be useful when printing out tagging, sales orders, and other similar items, because you can print the private label instead of the actual name used by the supplier. This makes it more difficult for customers to price shop.

“Retail Price” field: In this field can select a specific retail price formula, put in an exact amount like, or if you have zero in this field the pricing formulas will be automatically selected. See the retail price video below for more information.

“Roll (Box/Carton) Cost” and “Cut (Pallet) Cost” fields: Use these fields to define the cost based on roll or cut, and which cost you want to be the default in QPro.

“Promotional Pricing'' field: This feature has start and end dates for a promotional price during a certain period of time. fcB2B also uses this field because there are times that suppliers will send promotional prices automatically. When this happens it will override any of the default pricing during that period of time. Promotional pricing can also be used as future pricing, during times when you don’t want a certain price to be activated until a certain day.

“Backing”, “Freight”, “Shipping Weight”, “URL” fields: These fields are mostly informational at this point in QPro. You can save data for informational purposes for now and then this data will eventually be used in future releases. For example: URL fields will be used in the future to display things such as pictures and product spec sheets and things of that nature.

“Dropped” field: This is an important field to flag when a product is dropped and can no longer be ordered, but you still want to see the product in the product catalog.

“Sample Included” field: This is used as a basic tracking system to flag that there is a sample of this product out on the showroom floor.

“Ecommerce” field: This will be used in the future in order to show a product's information on a webpage for marketing purposes.

Training Videos and Customer Support

As you continue setting up QPro, it will be helpful to keep these training videos handy via this link (or you can also access them in QPro by clicking on the “?” found in the top right corner). We want you to feel supported as you set up QPro. In addition to the training videos, our support department is here as a resource for you as well. The QPro training/support department provides a level of service above and beyond other flooring software products. There are many ways to connect with support - keep this article bookmarked for support and training options.

Stay connected with the latest news from the QProDev Team! https://www.qprosoftware.com/dev/ Follow QProDev Team on Twitter: https://twitter.com/QProDevelopment or join our Users Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/782345780119024