Core concepts
Your quote tools, proposals, and widgets do not hold their own product or price data. They all read from one shared set of foundations. Get these right and everything downstream behaves; get them wrong and you will be chasing odd prices around the product wondering which tool is at fault.
This section explains each foundation on its own terms. It is worth reading before you configure any individual tool.
The pricing chain
Four of these concepts form a chain, and the order matters:
- Hardware catalogue — everything you sell, and what it costs you.
- Hardware packages — catalogue products grouped into the system options a customer chooses between.
- Pricing models — how a package's price is calculated from its contents.
- Extras and finance options — optional upsells, and how your customer pays.
A quote tool cannot show a package until that package has products and a price. A package cannot have products until the catalogue has them. So build from the bottom up.
In this section
- Hardware catalogue — your product library
- Hardware packages — sellable system options
- Pricing models — automatic price calculation
Pages on Extras, Finance options, Theme, Labels, Templates, Team profiles, and Discount codes are being written.
Walkthrough videos for the catalogue, packages, and pricing models are on each page above, and in the video library.
A note on libraries versus assignments
Several things in Simplified exist twice, and this confuses almost everyone at first.
Hardware Packages, Extras, and Finance Options each have a library under Settings, holding everything you have ever created. Each quote tool then has a tab of the same name, where you pick which library items that tool offers, and in what order.
So a package can exist and be perfectly configured yet never appear to a customer, simply because it was never assigned to the quote tool. If something is missing from a quote tool, check the assignment before you go looking for a bug.