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Catalogs — A Smarter Way to Control Pricing in Handoff

Catalogs allow you to build structured price books from your real supplier quotes, material lists, labor books, and internal pricing — so your estimates use your business rules, not generic pricing.

Sofia Herrera avatar
Written by Sofia Herrera
Updated over 2 weeks ago

🗂 Import Pricing From Real Documents

You can build catalogs using:

  • PDF price sheets

  • Excel or CSV files

  • Word files

  • Images / scans

  • Or manual entry

Handoff reads your document and extracts:

  • Item names

  • Units of measure

  • Base price values

To upload a catalog, open Handoff > go to settings > click on "AI Presets" > select "Catalog" and import or add manually. From there you can then edit and refine values inside the catalog.


✏️ Edit & Control Preset Rates

For each catalog item, you can adjust:

  • Price

  • Unit of Measure

  • Markup or Margin

  • Item name / description

  • Images (optional)

You can also create item-specific pricing rules, helping ensure estimates remain:

  • Profitable

  • Repeatable

  • Consistent across projects


🎯 Predictable AI Pricing Priority

When generating an estimate, Handoff follows this priority order:

1️⃣ Your Catalogs
2️⃣ Supplier catalogs (if enabled)
3️⃣ Local pricing

This ensures your own data is always used first. No more guessing whether a preset applied — pricing behavior is consistent and explainable.


🟢 Good / Better / Best Pricing

You can create multiple catalogs for different price tiers, such as:

  • Good

  • Better

  • Best

Then choose which catalog an estimate should use — or switch catalogs and update pricing.

This is useful for:

  • Multi-tier estimate proposals

  • Upsell options

  • Bid strategy flexibility


👀 See What Catalogs Are Applied Inside the Estimate

Inside an estimate, you can:

  • View which catalogs and pricing were used

  • Swap catalog rates

  • Replace items with different catalog items

  • Manually link or unlink individual rates

This gives you transparency and control over how pricing was applied.


🔁 Update Once — Fix Forever

If you edit a price directly from an estimate line item, you can choose to:

  • Apply that change back to the Catalog

This allows your catalog to evolve and improve as you refine pricing.

Future estimates will then inherit the updated value.


🗄 Archive Old Catalogs Safely

You can archive catalogs that are no longer in use.

Archived catalogs:

  • Will not be applied to new estimates

  • Will not appear in pricing suggestions

  • Will not break historical estimates

Existing estimates continue to reference the version that was active at the time.

This makes catalog maintenance safe and reliable.


⚠️ Behavior Notes & Edge Cases

  • Uploading a catalog with the same name creates a new duplicate catalog

  • Importing a new file inside an existing catalog does not attempt to detect duplicate rows

  • Quantities in estimates are not modified when attaching catalog rates

  • Catalog switching updates pricing, but quantities remain user-controlled

Catalogs support:

✔ Labor
✔ Materials
✔ Mixed catalog types
✔ Large-scale price books


🧭 Transition From “My Rates”

All existing "My Rates" entries will be migrated into Catalogs automatically.

You will see your past rates appear inside new catalogs — with no loss of historical links. From there, you can:

  • Clean up catalog structure

  • Upload additional vendor pricing

  • Create new catalogs

  • Apply markups or profit or taxes


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