Your items catalog and packages — Help

Most venues price the same things over and over: the same room hire, the same per-head menus, the same bar packages. The items catalog is where you set those up once, so building an event's charges, a quote, or an invoice becomes a matter of clicking, not typing. Set your prices and tax here, and every document you raise picks them up.

This article covers the three building blocks (categories, items, and packages), how tax flows through them, what an item can offer a client on a quote, and how they show up when you're pricing an event.

Where it is

Open Items in the sidebar (it sits under Invoices). The page has three sections, top to bottom: Categories, Items, and Packages. Build them in that order the first time, because items sit inside categories and packages are bundles of items.

Items

An item is a saved, priced line. Give it a name, a unit price, a category, and optionally a longer description that becomes the line's detail on the document. Three extra controls matter:

Per head. Tick this for anything charged per guest. When the item lands on an event's charges, its quantity follows the event's pax automatically.
Quantity. How many a new line starts with. Leave it blank and the line starts at 1. Set it to 3 on "Coverage, per hour" and every line built from that item opens at 3 hours. A per-head item ignores it and follows the guest count instead.
Tax. Leave it on Use category default to inherit the category's rate, or override it on the item when one product is taxed differently.

The list has an instant search and category filter, so a big menu stays manageable. Removing an item leaves any event lines already built from it untouched, so you can retire last season's pricing without disturbing past events.

What an item offers a client on a quote

If you have switched on Let clients adjust a quote (Account, Invoice settings), an item can also carry the choices a client gets when it lands on a quote. You set them once on the item instead of rebuilding them on every quote. With that setting off the panel does not appear, since nothing would act on it.

Open an item for editing, or start a new one, and click Client options. There are four things to set:

Client can change the quantity. Give the range: from, to, and the step it moves in. "Coverage, 6 to 10 hours, in steps of 0.25" gives the client a stepper bounded by those figures. A per-head item does not offer this, because its quantity follows the guest count on the quote.
Client can add or remove this line. The optional extra, like a second shooter or a late bar extension. Include it in the quote to start with decides which way round it reads. Ticked, the line is in the quote and in the total and the client can take it out. Unticked, it is shown with its price as an extra and joins the total only if the client picks it.
This item's quantity is how many hours the booking runs. For the line that sets the length of the day, so the quote says when the booking starts and finishes, and the finish time moves when the client changes the quantity. You can mark several items this way (three coverage tiers, say). Whichever one lands on a quote first holds the booking length, and any later one comes in as an ordinary line.
Note shown to the client. One line printed under the control on the client's quote, up to 300 characters. "Most weddings this size book 8 hours" is the shape of it.

Where an item carries any of these, the catalog list says so on its row: Client can change the quantity, Client can add or Client can remove, and Sets the booking times.

These settings are a template, not a live link. They are copied onto the line at the moment you add the item to a quote, the same way the price is, so editing the item later never reaches back into a quote already built from it, and a quote you have sent keeps what it was sent with. They apply to quotes only: an invoice, a client confirmation and an event's charges are the record of what was agreed, so the item lands on those as a plain line.

Letting a client adjust a quote covers what the client sees, and what you get back when they accept.

Packages

A package is a named bundle of items: a classic wedding package, a bar package, a day delegate rate. Create the package with a name and an optional note, then add items to it from your catalog. The package shows how many items it holds and their combined list price.

The payoff comes when you're pricing: add a package to an event's charges or an invoice and every item in it drops in at once, grouped under the package name, each as its own line with its own price and tax. You get the convenience of a bundle and the transparency of itemised lines in one click.

A package can also quote a lead for you. Choose it under Send a quote on a reply template, and every time that template is sent, whether by you or by Auto Reply, 1pm raises a quote from the package and links it in the email. See replying to leads for how that works.

How they show up when you price

On an event's charges, an invoice, or a quote, the Add from items picker lists your catalog: packages first, then items grouped by category, with a search box across the top. Click an item to add one line; click a package to add the whole group. Each entry shows its price (and a "/ head" tag where it applies) and its tax, so you can see what you're adding before you click. There's a Manage link in the picker that brings you back here.

A note on limits and tidying up

Categories, items, and packages each have a generous per-account limit; you'll see a note if you reach one. Everything is removed by archiving rather than hard deletion, which is what lets old documents keep rendering correctly: a price you change or an item you retire today never rewrites an invoice you sent last year.

Pricing an event covers using these items to build an event's charges.
Quotes and invoices covers turning that pricing into a quote or an invoice, and setting your tax rates.
Letting a client adjust a quote covers the client's side of the options you save on an item.