Five things make an item usable, and the editor tracks them as a readiness ring — so you know at a glance which products are actually ready to sell.
What Readiness Requires
An item is ready when it has an identity, a category, a coherent measurement, a cost, and a sell price. Only those five gate readiness, because only those five affect money downstream.
Photos, descriptions, and add-on options are enrichment. They make an estimate look better but they never block an item from being sold, so they don't count against the ring.
- Identity — the name becomes the estimate line description.
- Category — drives matching and filing (materials only).
- Measurement — a supplier unit needs its coverage bridge.
- Cost and sell price.
- Photos and descriptions are enrichment, never gating.
Measure In One Unit, Buy In Another
You measure in square feet but you buy in bundles. An item can record how much measured area one order unit covers — a bundle covering 33.3 square feet, say — and the takeoff converts your measurement into whole supplier units to actually order.
That coverage bridge is why a material item with a supplier unit isn't ready until it's set. Without it, the takeoff can total your measurement but can't tell you what to buy.
- Measured units: square feet, linear feet, square yards, each.
- Supplier units: bundle, box, bag, case, pallet, roll, sheet, pair, ton, and more.
- Coverage converts measurement into whole order units.
- A waste factor is applied per product, not guessed globally.
Pro tip: Set waste on the product, not in your head. It's the difference between a takeoff you can hand to a supplier and one you have to mentally adjust every time.
Costs And The Four Prices
An item carries a cost and four sell prices — cash, standard, finance, and premium — plus optional separate material and labor costs, which is what lets the estimate show margin per line.
Prices normally derive from your pricing strategy. When you hand-set one, that's recorded, so a later cost change re-derives the tiers you left alone and leaves the ones you deliberately set. Provenance is explicit rather than guessed.
- One cost, four tier prices.
- Material and labor cost can be tracked separately.
- Hand-set tiers are remembered as hand-set.
- Unmarked tiers re-derive when the cost changes.
Size-Based Pricing
Some products don't have one price — a window costs what it costs by size. An item can carry a size grid where each row says "up to this many united inches, this is your cost," and the tiers derive from the book's strategy exactly as they do for anything else.
Where a product covers a particular style, that style is recorded too, so a tag placed on the canvas can match to the right product automatically.
- United-inch size bands for window products.
- Each band sets the cost; tiers still derive from strategy.
- Style-aware matching links a canvas tag to the right product.
- Minimum and maximum size limits can be set per item.