Catalog, services and discounts

The catalog has three tabs — Items, Services and Discounts — and the first two do genuinely different jobs. This is the one idea in HootQuill that is worth five minutes of reading, because everything downstream depends on it.

An item is a line that can appear on a quote. It carries:

• A price and a cost. Price is what the client pays; cost is what you pay. Cost is optional and feeds your margin reporting — leave it blank rather than entering zero, because blank means unrecorded and zero means free.
• Billed per — per device, per user, per server, per site, per hour, each, or a flat fee. This is what the quantity on a quote means.
• Billing period — monthly, annual or one-time. This is what decides whether an item recurs, which in turn decides whether the quote needs a term and what gets created in QuickBooks.
• Taxable — whether sales tax applies to the line.

Catalog→Services. A service is a group of items that share contract wording. Managed IT is a service. Web is a service. Licensing is a service.

Each service owns the sections that describe it — your SLA, your on-site response times, your hosting warranty. Assign an item to a service and everything that service’s sections say appears on any quote containing that item. Nothing is wired up per item.

That is the whole trick. Sell somebody Tier 2 Managed IT and the agreement they receive contains your Managed IT terms. Sell them hosting as well and the hosting warranty appears too. Sell them neither and neither section prints — so the client is not reading three pages about on-site support they did not buy.

It also means you maintain the wording in one place. Add a section to the Managed IT service and every future quote with a Managed IT item on it picks the section up. You do not go back through forty catalog items.

There is also an Extra clause keys field on each item, for the rare case where one SKU alone needs a section nothing else in its service needs. It is usually empty — if two items need the same wording, that wording belongs on the service.

Named discount rates that appear in the quote builder — a standing nonprofit rate, a multi-year rate, a partner rate. Define them once here and they are offered as options on a line rather than retyped as a percentage every time, which is how two quotes end up with two different “standard” discounts.

Discounts apply per line and are exact to the cent.

Once your items are grouped into services, the next thing to do is write the sections those services print — Templates and clauses. If you use QuickBooks, items are also the records that get linked to your QuickBooks products and services, so an invoice posts to the right income account: see Linking clients and items.