The catalog is the list of what you sell — services and materials — with what each one costs you, what it is priced at, and how long it takes.
It comes from your field service system, so it is the same list your team quotes from rather than a second one that drifts.
What is in it
Items are split into services and materials, grouped into categories.
Each carries a duration where one applies, and whether it is online-bookable — meaning a customer can pick it themselves from a booking page rather than calling.
Price forms are the option sets attached to an item: the fields that change a price when a job is being quoted, rather than one flat number for every version of the work.
Why it is worth keeping current
A catalog is the one place where a pricing decision gets made once and applied consistently. Every quote your team writes inherits it.
Which means a stale catalog is not a tidiness problem — it is a margin problem that compounds silently. A material whose cost went up 18% and whose catalog price did not is losing you money on every job that includes it, and it will keep doing so until somebody notices, because nothing about the job looks unusual.
Reviewing costs against a supplier invoice once a quarter catches nearly all of it.
Margin, not markup
Prices set as a markup on cost do not produce the margin the number suggests — a 40% markup is about a 29% margin. See markup and margin, which is the single most expensive arithmetic mistake in the trades.
Where to check whether it is working
The catalog says what you intended to charge. Job margins says what you actually kept. When the two disagree, the answer is almost always in labour hours or materials that never made it onto the invoice.