This is an introductory article about the basics of Catalogs in PurchasePlus.
What is a Catalog?
A Catalog is a collection of Products with a Price that you purchase from Suppliers with whom your Organization has an enabled Trade Relationship.
Catalogs can be:
- Supplier-managed, which means that a Registered Supplier has created the Catalog, and populated it with Products and Prices. As a Purchaser, you cannot edit Supplier-managed Catalogs.
- Self Managed, which means that a user at a Purchasing Organization has created the Catalog, populated it with Products and Prices, and assigned it to one of your Suppliers. Self Managed Catalogs can be assigned to both Self Managed and Registered Suppliers, but only your Purchasing Organization is able to view and manage a Self Managed Catalog - regardless of whether the Self Managed Catalog is assigned to a Registered Supplier.
Once a Catalog is created, populated with Products, and assigned to a Supplier, users at your Organization can begin adding any Products contained in that Catalog to their Requisitions.
Viewing Catalogs in PurchasePlus
You can view the Catalogs that are available to your Organization in the Side Navigation bar by clicking [Catalogs] → [View All]. For more information, please read our article about Viewing Supplier Catalogs.
Creating Catalogs
You can Create a new Self Managed Catalog by clicking [Catalogs] → [New Catalog] in the Side Navigation bar. Creating a New Catalog as a Purchaser will set the Catalog’s ‘Owner’ to your Organization’s ID (which makes this a Self Managed Catalog), regardless of which Supplier you assign the Catalog to.
You can populate the Self Managed Catalog in two main ways:
- By adding Products and Prices manually, or
- By importing the Products and prices from a spreadsheet template. Please note that populating a Catalog using this method requires the Products to be created in our system first.
Contract Catalogs
A Catalog can be a ‘Contract Catalog’. Quotes (i.e. a Price for a Product) from a Contract Catalogue are exclusive to the Supplier to whom the Catalogue is attributed, and competing quotes from other Suppliers on the same product will no longer appear to users at your Organization when they are creating a Requisition.
This effectively means that any user looking to purchase a Product that appears in this Catalog will only see this Supplier’s (i.e. the Catalog Owner’s) price, and will not be able to purchase the Product from any other Supplier.