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Materials and Specifications

The Catalog section on PriceLoom.com contains the basis for all subsequent calculations of your products - these are raw materials and product specifications. These items form a list that is displayed as one common table, without internal division into raw materials and specifications. Above the table is a search field that allows you to instantly find the necessary entries by entering part of their name. Next to the search field are buttons to add a new material or specification.

Materials

A material is any raw material or ingredient used in production. The material is purchased from a supplier, so it has a purchase price. This price is specified when creating a new material. The cost of raw materials at the supplier can change over time, so to keep the price list up to date, the purchase price of the material should be periodically updated.

Adding a new material

  1. Go to the Catalog menu item.
Creating a material
2. To create a new material, click the "Material" button.
Filling in information about the material
3. Fill in the required fields in the form that opens: name, unit of measurement and purchase price. If necessary, enter a note.
  1. Save the new material.

Specifications

A specification is a description of a finished product or semi-finished product, containing a list of materials needed for its production. Specifications have a name and a unit of measurement. It is important that the materials in the specification are given per unit of measurement of the specification itself.

Specifications can be single-level and multi-level. Single-level specifications consist only of a list of raw materials and are found for example in cooking recipes. Complex ones include other specifications, forming a complex hierarchical structure. Both options are supported by our web application.

Adding a specification

  1. Go to the Catalog menu item.
Creating a specification
2. To create a new specification, click the "Specification" button.
  1. The specification creation page will open, consisting of data input fields and two tables at the bottom.
Filling out a specification
4. Fill in the fields: name, unit of measurement, and note (pos.1)
  1. In the lower block, consisting of two tables, fill in the "Specification content" table (pos.3) using data from the "Selection Table" (pos.2), which contains all available materials and specifications.
  1. For quick search of the necessary positions in the "Selection Table", use the search.
  1. After indicating the quantity and clicking on the plus in the "Selection Table", the position moves to the "Composition of the specification" table and becomes part of the specification.
  1. Save the specification.

Viewing the specification structure

You can view the structure of a specification by going to the specification view and clicking the "View specification structure" link there.

View specification structure
This will allow you to see the hierarchical structure of the specification, including all materials and other nested specifications in one view.
Specification structure

View usage in specifications

A material, like a semi-finished product specification, can be used in other specifications. To identify where exactly the current item is used, click the "View usage in specifications" link. You will see a list of specifications in which this item is used, or receive a notification if the material or specification is not used anywhere.

This is especially useful when you need to delete a material or specification, but first need to manually remove them from all related specifications.

Adding to the price list

Any material or specification can be added to the Price list. To do this, you need to click the corresponding "Add to price list" link and enter a markup (and fill in the values of the formula variables, if there are any).

In this way, you can add materials used in your production and create specifications for your products. This will allow for all subsequent calculations.