Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Products & Services Catalogue.

So let’s start with what this catalogue actually is. Think of it as the master reference for everything NZRT sells, buys, or manufactures. If an item appears on an invoice, a purchase order, or a commercial proposal, it lives here first. Every product, every service, every line item has to be defined in this catalogue before it can go anywhere else in the system. It’s the single source of truth for your product and service data.

Now let’s walk through the key fields you’ll encounter when you open up a product or service record. There are several important pieces of information that make each record tick, and understanding them will save you a lot of confusion down the line.

The first field is the Reference. This is the unique product code that identifies the item. No two products share the same reference, so when you’re searching, filtering, or reporting, this is the field that keeps everything unambiguous. It’s essentially the item’s ID across the whole system.

Next up is the Label. This is the display name — the human-readable name that shows up on documents like quotes, invoices, and proposals. Customers see this, so it needs to be clear and descriptive.

Then you have the Type field, and this one is important because it determines how the system handles the item. A product is stock-tracked, meaning the system monitors quantities, movements, and inventory levels. A service, on the other hand, is non-stock — it doesn’t have physical inventory behind it. Think of hours of consulting work versus a physical piece of hardware. Same catalogue, different behaviour under the hood.

After that, you’ve got the Selling Price and the Cost Price. These two fields work together to give you your margin calculation. The selling price is what you charge the customer. The cost price is what it costs you to provide or procure the item. The gap between the two is your margin, and the system uses these fields to surface that for you automatically on reports and proposals.

The VAT Rate field defines the tax rate applied to the item when it appears on invoices and proposals. Getting this right at the product level means you don’t have to think about it every time you raise a document — it just flows through correctly.

The Unit of Measure field tells the system how the item is counted or measured. This could be pieces, kilograms, hours, litres, or any other unit relevant to the item. It’s what appears alongside the quantity on your documents, so again — setting it correctly here saves effort everywhere else.

You’ll also notice two additional fields referenced in the catalogue: Barcodes and Variants. Barcodes are covered in their own dedicated section of the wiki, so if you’re working with physical products and need to assign or scan barcodes, that’s where you’ll find the detail. Variants are similarly covered separately — these come into play when a single product exists in multiple configurations, like different sizes or colours. Both of those topics go deeper than the catalogue overview, so they have their own space.

Now let’s talk about where the Products and Services Catalogue connects to the rest of the system. There are three key areas.

First is Stock and Warehouse Management. Any item typed as a product — meaning it’s stock-tracked — will feed into your stock levels, warehouse locations, and inventory movements. The catalogue is where the item is defined; the stock module is where its physical life plays out.

Second is Bill of Materials. If you manufacture or assemble anything, the Bill of Materials module uses catalogue items as the components. You define what goes into a finished product by referencing other catalogue entries, so a clean, well-maintained catalogue directly supports your production workflows.

Third is Commercial Proposals. When your team puts together a quote for a customer, they’re pulling items directly from this catalogue. The label, the selling price, the VAT rate, the unit of measure — all of it flows from the catalogue record into the proposal automatically. This is why keeping catalogue data accurate is so important — errors here show up directly on customer-facing documents.

So to bring it all together — the Products and Services Catalogue is the foundation layer for almost everything commercial in the system. You define an item once, with the right reference, label, type, pricing, tax rate, and unit, and that definition then powers your invoicing, your stock management, your manufacturing, and your sales proposals. The more accurate and consistent your catalogue entries are, the smoother everything downstream runs.

If you’re new to managing products in the system, start by understanding the distinction between products and services — that Type field really does change how the system behaves. And make sure your reference codes follow whatever naming convention your team has agreed on, because once references are in use on transactions, renaming them gets complicated.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.