Adding items to the price list

The price list is the catalog of everything you sell. Every estimate, every job line, every invoice draws from it. Set it up well and pricing is consistent, tax computes correctly, and reports are clean. Set it up sloppily and you'll see "Service Call", "service call", "Svc Call $89", "service call (x3)" all over your data and spend years trying to clean it up.

This article covers adding items one at a time — names, prices, tax categories, item categorization, and the small judgment calls that compound across hundreds of items. For bulk import, see Importing a price list from CSV.

When you'd add items one at a time

Brand-new account with a small catalog (under ~30 items). Faster to type than to template a CSV.
Adding a few new items to an established catalog (you started selling a new product, you launched a new service line).
Cleaning up duplicates or fixing typos found during a review.
Editing existing items (price changes, tax category adjustments, name fixes).

If you have a long catalog from a previous system, don't type 800 items by hand — see the import article. Hand-entry is for small batches and edits.

What an item carries

Each price list item has a handful of fields that all matter downstream. The list:

Name — what the customer sees on the invoice. Clear, professional, consistent.
Description — optional longer text shown under the name on the invoice. Use for items where the name alone isn't self-explanatory.
Unit price — what you charge.
Cost — what it costs you (for margin reporting). Optional but recommended.
Tax Category — which tax rate(s) apply. See How tax categories work.
Item type (Service vs. Product, sometimes more granular) — affects whether inventory is tracked.
Item category (your internal taxonomy — "Plumbing", "HVAC Parts", "Diagnostic Services") — for reporting and search.
Active flag — whether the item is currently sellable. Inactive items disappear from new invoices but stay attached to old ones.
QB sync fields — class, account, item type for QB. Set defaults so all items sync cleanly.

The price list screen shows the catalog as a searchable list:

The price list with sample items

Adding an item — the typical flow

Open the price list (under inventory or financial settings, depending on your sidebar layout).
Click Add Item (or equivalent).
Fill in the fields. Order doesn't matter, but consider:
- Decide the name first. Hard to change later if it's already on dozens of invoices.
- Tax category is the most-frequently-wrong field. Get it right at creation, not later.
- Leave cost blank if you genuinely don't know it. Don't put placeholder values; they corrupt margin reports.
Save.

Now the item is available to add to estimates, jobs, and invoices.

Picking the right name

The name appears on the customer-facing invoice. That's the main thing it has to do well.

Be specific enough to be unambiguous. "Service Call" is too vague; "Service Call - Standard 1hr" is clearer. The customer should recognize what they're being billed for.
Be short enough to read. "Standard On-Site Service Call (1hr)" works; "Standard On-Site Diagnostic And Initial Triage Service Call With Up To One Hour Of Labor Included" is too long.
Be consistent. Pick a naming convention and apply it across the catalog. If you use "Service - X" for services and "Part - X" for parts, do it for all of them, not just half.
Don't put pricing in the name. "$89 Service Call" is fine until you raise the rate. The name shouldn't carry information that lives in another field.
Avoid internal codes that don't mean anything to the customer. "SC-001" is fine in your inventory system; on the invoice it should say what the customer bought.

When the same physical thing has two pricing tiers (residential rate vs. commercial rate), they're two items with two clear names ("Service Call - Residential", "Service Call - Commercial"), not one item that you re-price every time.

Picking the right tax category

This is the field people most commonly get wrong, and the one that costs the most when it's wrong — under-collected or over-collected sales tax adds up fast across a year of invoices.

For items that get taxed at your normal rate: tax category is your "Taxable Goods" category (or whatever you've named your standard taxable bucket).

For items that are tax-exempt as items (e.g., labor in a labor-non-taxable state): tax category is the relevant exempt or special category. Don't leave the field blank — explicit categories make audit trails clean.

If you're not sure which category to use, read Picking the right tax category strategy and How tax categories work. The strategy article is the wider conversation; the how-it-works article covers the mechanics.

The bulk-apply tool on the tax categories screen is your friend if you've already added items without thinking about tax — you can re-tag many items at once. But it's still cleaner to set it right at creation.

Item categories — your reporting taxonomy

The "category" field on an item is your internal taxonomy: Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diagnostic, Materials, etc. (Don't confuse with tax category — these are separate concepts.)

Categories drive:

Reports grouped by item category (revenue by service line, margin by category).
Search and filtering on the price list screen.
Sometimes: which staff users see which items, depending on permissions setup.

A few rules of thumb:

8–15 categories is the sweet spot. Fewer means reports are too coarse; more means staff can't remember which is which.
Categorize by what they are, not where they're sold. "HVAC Parts" is durable; "Summer Specials" becomes meaningless next March.
Don't make a category of one item. Reorganize until each category has at least 3-5 items.

Cost vs. price — margin tracking

The cost field is what you pay the vendor. The unit price is what you charge the customer. The difference is your margin, and the system can report on it if you set both.

For services you produce (labor), cost is usually the loaded labor rate (employee wage + overhead). It's an estimate; that's fine. Better an approximate cost than a blank one for reporting purposes.

For products you resell, cost is what the vendor charged you. If you buy from multiple vendors at different prices, see Vendors and vendor price books — vendor price books let you track per-vendor cost separately.

If cost is genuinely unknown and you don't want to guess, leave it blank. A blank cost shows as "no margin data" in reports, which is honest. A made-up cost (e.g., "I'll just put $1") creates fictitious margin numbers that mislead.

Active vs. inactive

When you stop selling something — a discontinued part, a service line you've retired — set the item to inactive. The item disappears from new invoices but remains attached to old ones (so historical invoices and reports don't break).

Don't delete items that have ever been used. Deleting can corrupt the historical records that reference them. Inactivate instead. Most systems include a "show inactive" toggle so you can find old items when needed.

QuickBooks sync fields

If QuickBooks is connected, each price list item also has a few QB-specific fields:

QB Item Type — Service, Inventory, Non-Inventory, etc.
QB Income Account — which QB chart-of-accounts account the revenue lands in.
QB Class — if you use class tracking.
QB Sync flag — whether this item should sync at all.

For a small catalog, set defaults at the catalog level (in QB settings) so all items inherit the right values. For a large catalog with multiple service lines, you may need different income accounts per line — which is a reason to be deliberate about item categorization.

If an item doesn't sync to QB, the most common cause is a missing or wrong income account on the item. Check the QB sync log for the specific error.

Common mistakes

Inconsistent naming. "Service Call", "Service call", "Svc Call", "Onsite Service" all in one catalog. Pick one and stick with it.
Putting prices in names. "$89 Service Call" outdates immediately. Use the price field.
Leaving tax category blank. Items without an explicit category fall into hard-to-debug behavior. Always set it.
Creating duplicate items instead of editing existing ones. When you raise the price, edit the existing item; don't make "Service Call v2" alongside "Service Call". Old item gets used by mistake.
Treating item category and tax category as the same thing. They're separate. "HVAC Parts" (item category, for your reporting) is different from "Taxable Goods" (tax category, for tax computation).
Deleting items that have history. Inactivate, don't delete. Deletion can break historical records and QB sync.
No description on items where the name needs more context. Compound items, kits, hourly services with conditions — the description field is there for a reason.
Setting cost to 0 instead of leaving blank. Zero cost = 100% margin in reports, which is wrong. Leave blank if unknown.
Forgetting to flag the item as active. If an item exists but is inactive, staff can't add it to invoices and may not understand why.
Building a long catalog item-by-item instead of importing. If you have 50+ items from a previous system, import them — it's much faster and more consistent.