How to Use Materials & Services: Adding, Importing and Editing Materials & Services

Within Inspect Point, you can add fixed-price service items as well as materials into Materials & Services which can then be used on proposals, work orders and invoices.

Note: Customers who signed up prior to July 2023 may also have access to legacy materials, which are managed separately. For more information about this, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Overview of Materials & Services

There are two categories for corrections: materials, and services. You can creates types for each category. You can filter on these types so that you, or your technicians, can quickly find the specific item you are looking for. All items have the following fields:

• Name
  • This is the primary field used to identify a correction, and should be unique.
• Description
  • This is optional and can be the same as name or different; it is the default description and can be modified as needed on proposals, work orders and invoices.
• Category
  • Material, or Service
• Type
  • This is an optional field. You can add custom material or service types, which is described below.
• Unit Cost
  • This is an optional field. The pre-markup price charged to your customers for the material 
• Price 
  • The post-markup price charged to your customer
• Taxable
  • You can indicate if the item should be taxed or not.
• Price Levels
  • This is an optional field that allows you to set-up multiple prices for the item.

Material items have these fields in addition to the ones above:

• Manufacturer
• Model Number
• Part Number
• List Price 
  • This is an optional field. The list price from your distributor

Setting up Types

The following service types are available by default:

• General
• Fire alarm
• Sprinkler
• Fire extinguisher
• Fire exit sign
• Fire door
• Special hazard
• Suppression
• Back flow
• Fire pump

In addition, you can add new service OR material types. In your Settings area, click Materials & Services Types, then "New Materials & Services Type." You can select the category and create the types. (Note, if you are importing items, you can also assign types in the CSV file, and they will automatically be created upon import.)

Adding or Importing Items

There are four ways to get your items into Inspect Point:

1. Creating individual items manually
2. Importing through our CSV mapping tool
3. Importing via QuickBooks Desktop *This is covered separately in our QuickBooks documentation, see here: QuickBooks Online | QuickBooks Desktop

Here's more information on each approach:

1. Creating individual items manually

To add an item manually, click into your Materials & Services page, then click "New Item."

Then, choose the category (Service or Material) and fill out the relevant fields as described above:

Press "Create," and complete as needed.

2. Importing through our CSV mapping tool

This method is done by clicking either Import Materials or Import Services in the screenshot above. This allows you to select fields in your spreadsheet and map them to fields within Inspect Point. See here for a complete tutorial on that process.

See the attached templates for Materials & Services at the end of the article for what fields to include in your imports.

Editing Materials & Services

Once your items are added, you can edit them as needed. You can click on the various price fields to edit directly on the grid:

Or, you can hover over the three dots at the end of the row and click to edit other fields:

Your items can then be used on proposals, work orders and invoices.