How to Build and Maintain the Perfect SimPRO Catalogue

So.... how's your catalogue?

Do you have the parts you need? Do you trust the data in there? How much of it do you actually use, and how much is just junk?

The catalogue is the foundation of material management in simPRO, affecting stock management, prebuild pricing, onsite upselling and more. Unfortunately, it's also an area of your database that is easy to mess up. Without proper care, it can quickly become a morass of duplicates, outdated prices, and untrustworthy data.

Many businesses like the idea of a well-kept internal catalogue, but often it just seems like too much work. It never has the right parts, bad data starts to grow in there like weeds, and before long, people begin to lose trust in it, develop workarounds, and all benefit is lost.

Occasionally someone will make a resolution to clean it all up, and maybe they do. But maintenance is a job that is never urgent until it's too late, and so tends to slip down the list of priorities. After a while, enthusiasm evaporates and we are back in the land of one-off items for everything.

Well, it can be done.

In this post I'll show you how to set up a simPRO catalogue properly, and maintain it with minimal effort.

But First - do You EVEN need a catalogue?

One of my favourite management quotes is from Peter Drucker:

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

You're probably reading this article because you want to get a handle on your simPRO catalogue, and that's why I wrote it. But as with all business decisions, it's worth stopping and asking whether this is really going to be worth the time and effort. As one builder put it, "That's just a beast I have to feed."

In his case, his business bought materials from a huge variety of suppliers, much of it made to order for each project. They didn't hold stock, and their suppliers couldn't provide them with up to date price files in a format which was easy to import. In that case, it made more sense to mostly use one-off items.

So before you invest valuable time and energy in establishing and maintaining a catalogue, ask yourself the following:

Questions	Yes	No
Do we regularly order and sell many of the same items?
Can our suppliers provide us with price files in spreadsheet format?
Do our suppliers support automatic price updates?
Do we need to manage inventory?
Have we made material pricing promises to customers?
Do we use prebuilds with parts in them?
Do we need to track price changes for particular items?
Do we need to compare item prices from multiple suppliers?
Do our field techs need to have access to catalogue items in simPRO Mobile?

If you answered mostly "Yes", investing in your catalogue is likely worth it. Read on.

Signal Vs Noise

The main concept to understand with regards to managing a catalogue (or any system) is the signal to noise ratio. With regards to information, signal is high-quality, relevant, accurate information. Noise is everything else.

When you search for a part in your catalogue, the part you are looking for is the signal; everything else is noise. When you are listening to someone tell a story at a party, the speaker's voice is the signal, and everyone else's voices are noise. If that person is telling a long-winded story, all the irrelevant details are noise; the point you are patiently waiting for them to arrive at is the signal. Email spam is noise. Relevant and actionable correspondence is signal. You get the idea.

Here are the concrete steps to take to improve the signal to noise ratio of your catalogue.

Step 1: Clean up your existing catalogue

You can't reduce noise by adding more signal. You need to declutter first.

Go to your catalogue and type in % in your search bar and press enter. Whatever number comes up above the search bar will show you how many items are in your catalogue. Then ask yourself how many of those items you would be likely to actually buy and sell.

Run the Inactive Catalogue Items Report. This will give you a quantitative idea of how much of your catalogue you never use.

For most service businesses, a catalogue of 1,000-5,000 items is the right balance between having all the items you need, and not too many that you don't.

If your catalogue already has a ton of junk parts (noise), it can be tempting to just delete everything and start afresh. But what if there are items you do need in there, such as:

• Favourites

• Items used in prebuilds or takeoff templates

• Items frequently bought or sold

• Items in stock

If you delete everything you will throw the baby out with the bathwater and have to re-enter your prebuilds, takeoff templates, favourites etc. In that case, the Pro Suite Catalogue Cleanup can archive all the items you don't need and leave the ones you do.

If you don't have any valuable items in your catalogue, just archive everything (we can also do that for you) and go to step 2.

Step 2. Future-Proof your Catalogue

Now that your catalogue is clean, we want to make sure it stays that way. Don't skip this step, or all your hard work will go to waste.

1. Go to Utilities > Import > Catalogue and check if you have any automatic price updates turned on. Make sure they are set to Update Only. This will update your existing catalogue items and ignore the rest. The most common reason people's catalogues are messed up is that they have used the wrong import settings for linked suppliers and accidentally imported complete supplier catalogues.

2. Go to Setup > Security groups and decide who can and can't import, create, edit and delete items. It's not a matter of suspicion, it's a matter of removing room for error. Many systems have been messed up by well-meaning people making easily preventable mistakes.

Step 3. Import Your Price Files

1. Get price files from all your regular suppliers. Each price file should be a spreadsheet, not a PDF or Word doc or anything else. If PDF is all they can provide, try converting it to a spreadsheet here.

2. If the supplier has a very large catalogue, ask for a focussed list. Often they can give you everything you have ordered from them in the last, say, 2 years, or a list of their most popular items. Failing that, open the spreadsheet and remove unnecessary items before you import it.

3. The top row should be the headers (Part Number, Description, Cost Price etc.) All others rows should represent individual items.

   

   How to set up your spreadsheet to import parts into simPRO.

4. Make sure the price file has columns for at least Cost Price, Part Number, and Description. All the other details are optional. If you're using the import template, just delete unneeded columns.

5. Add columns for groups and subgroups so that when the parts imported they are logically organized. If the supplier already has their items grouped, just use their groups.

6. Save it as a .csv file.

7. In simPRO, go to Utilities > Import > Generic to import the file.

   1. Update Only looks for matching part numbers and updates those items. Generally best for catalogue maintenance.

   2. Update and Create New will update matching items and create the missing ones. Only use if you need every item on the price file.

   (If you're not great with a spreadsheet, Pro Suite can format your file for you or even build a tool that you can use to translate your supplier's format into a simPRO-friendly format. Contact us for a quote.)

Step 4: Keep It Clean

1. If you have suppliers with automatic price updates, go to Utilities > Import > Catalogue, select the supplier and enter your account details. Set it to Update Only.

2. For suppliers that aren't linked, ask them to send you price lists regularly. If they have a website where you can download it yourself, set a calendar reminder to do that every month. Once you've done it a few times, the import process doesn't take long at all. If the suppliers can only supply you a price file in an annoying and incompatible format, contact us to see if we can build a tool to speed up the process.

3. For suppliers that aren't linked and can't give you price files, run the Price Discrepancies Report . You can also set this up as a scheduled report to land in your inbox on a regular basis. This will show you the difference between what your catalogue says and what you actually paid for the item. It's a great tool to keep your suppliers honest and update your pricing based on the actual costs.
   

Additional Tips

• Don't obsess over catalogue groups when setting up your catalogue. It doesn't matter half as much as you think; it's much more intuitive and efficient to find things using part numbers, names and search terms than browsing through groups.

• Don't group your items by supplier; group them by type (cable, pipe, timber etc). The only exception is specialty products available from only one supplier. Otherwise, make your group names generic so they can contain items from multiple suppliers.

• Merge duplicate items. If two items are functionally the same, but can be supplied by different suppliers, they may have different part numbers and show up as separate items in your catalogue. Merging duplicate items means you can get instant price comparisons, giving you more bargaining power and price saving alerts when you raise purchase orders. You can run the Duplicate Items Report to find and merge parts with identical part numbers or names, but often the names and/or numbers are slightly different, so only someone with technical expertise - such as yourself - will know what the items are and whether they should be merged. This is a manual process, but the potential cost savings can be well worth the effort. And if you are managing inventory, merging duplicate parts is essential.

• Don't start your own part number system unless you absolutely have to. Maintaining your own part numbers is an obligation that never ends. The main challenge is preventing duplicates, and your suppliers have already done this. In most cases, it is easier to simply inherit their part numbers. If you absolutely must make your own part numbers, the easiest way to prevent duplicates is to encode the date and time in them, each of which will be sequential and unique. For example, if you use the format YY-MM-DD-HH:MM, then 6 April, 2026 at 4:17pm will generate a part number of 2604061617. Due to the ever-flowing river of time, this sequence of numbers will never recur, and it also encodes a little information about when it was created. It also has the added advantage of not having to maintain a seperate ledger of serial numbers to match with simPRO.