Table of Contents
Purpose
An equipment item is a specific item type that is used when performing a service and needs to be added to your customer’s estimates. Typically, they have a cost associated with them.
Having a set of predefined equipment items in your catalog provides significant benefits for accurately quoting and tracking equipment related costs!
You could track equipment items from categories like:
Rental Equipment - You can create catalog items for rental machinery like excavators, and skid steers, with different rental pricing structures built into your pricing.
Owned Assets - Build items for owned equipment items with time based billing rates to properly capture utilization costs on jobs.
Then, when using items from the Item Catalog during the estimating process, you can quickly select these predefined items!
🧠 Some Equipment item examples include: Skid Steer, Bobcat, and Sod Cutter.
Requirements
✅In order to add Equipment Items to the Item Catalog, you must have System Admin or Branch Admin permission.
✅If you have Branch Admin permission you’d also need Enhanced Branch Admin Security added to your user role.
Creating an Equipment Item in the Item Catalog
Before Equipment items can be used on estimates, they must first be created in the item catalog.
The item catalog is located in the Estimating tab of Administration, is a record of current or past items that have been created for estimating services.
⚠️ In this article, we will go over important fields to use, and skip over the ones not needed for equipment item set up.
To add an item to the catalog:
Click your Profile Icon in the blue side menu. Then, select Administration.
Navigate to the Estimating tab and then select the Item Catalog tab.
To create a new item for the item catalog, click the blue New icon and a dropdown menu will appear. Select the New Equipment item type.
The New Equipment Item screen will appear.
You can begin to add your Equipment Item details to get closer to adding it to the Item Catalog!
Type in the Equipment’s Item Name.
This will be the name that is displayed on your customer’s proposal.
The Alternate Name can be the same as the item name, left blank, or updated.
You can edit the alternate name to be a specific name of a product, plant genus, species or other scientific names as needed.
Alternate Name appears in the Item Catalog Search List, when searching in the Purchasing Assistant, is available for use on Purchase Receipt layouts or on estimate sheet layouts.
Select the Category that the Equipment Item should belong to.
Most users of Aspire use the Equipment category type, but you can create custom categories as you need!
Custom Catalog Item Categories can be set up in Lists in Administration.
The Item Code field is also available below Item Category.
This is an optional field where you can enter a vendor code or manufacturer code.
📑Learn more about the differences between Item Name vs. Item Alternate Name vs. Item Code by clicking here.
📑 In this next section, we discuss Purchase Units vs. Allocation Units. For a more detailed explanation of how to set these up, read this article!
Enter in how much the unit cost is from the vendor in the Purchase Unit Cost field.
Select the purchase unit’s measurement which is how the item is ordered or bought.
Select the allocation unit’s measurement in how the item will be allocated to jobs.
If unit measure is different from the Purchase Unit you will need to fill out the conversion factor in the Allocation field.
See chart below for examples:
Item Name | Purchase Unit | Conversion | Allocation Unit |
Chipper Rental | 1 Day | 1 | Day |
Sod Cutter | Dollars | 1 | Dollars |
Skid Steer | 1 Day | 8 | Hours |
📌 Note: The Allocation Item Cost will update once the item has been saved.
Assign the branch(es) for where the item will be available. This function is available only if the Enhanced Branch Admin Security permission is checked in Administration ➡️ Configuration ➡️ Application.
Select All Branches so your item is available to all branches or if your item is specific to a certain branch, you can select the branch from this drop down.
The Description field provides a more complete description of the item. This note becomes available when the item is placed onto a service in the estimate.
🧠You can also choose to include the item description in a proposal layout to give extra information to your customer.
Checking the Available to bid checkbox will make sure the item can be used when estimating a service that contains the item.
Checking the Inventory item checkbox will make the item available to be received in inventory.
Checking the Allocate from Mobile checkbox allows for items to be added as costs to tickets in Aspire's mobile app and Time Entry.
Usually, this is used for equipment during snow like a skid steer vs. a snow plow.
However, this box should only be used for Items that have a $0 cost.
The Price List is found at the bottom of the item details screen.
You can select New to create an Allocation item cost different from the original cost by entering the new price list purchase unit cost.
This new cost will be applied to the price list catalog you’ve selected.
🧠Reminder: Price List Catalogs are used for setting up pricing overrides at the branch level for specific items in the catalog. Catalog Price Lists are added to your organization’s Branches on the Branches screen.
When all of your edits to your Equipment Item have been made, select save to add it to the item catalog.
⚠️ If you want to edit the item name later, after it has been bid, we recommend not changing the name on the original item. Instead, make the item unavailable to bid and create a new item. Update kits and templates with that item, then deactivate the old item.