Quote lines now link to the catalogue item they are for
This is a fix to a real problem, and it is the second half of a story that started last release.
A quote line has two separate things on it: the part number printed on the customer's PDF, and the link to the catalogue item it is actually for. When Claude added a line, it filled in the printed part number and left the link empty — every single time. Nothing looked wrong. The line total, the quote total, the PDF and the margin were all exactly right.
The link is what carries a line's revenue account through to Xero. Without it, an invoice raised from that quote reaches Xero without a revenue account of its own, so revenue and cost reporting by category cannot account for those lines. Twelve recent quotes were checked: every quote whose lines were entered in the app was fully linked, and every quote whose lines came through the connection had none. One of them was a twenty-line hardware and support quote.
It also forced a split way of working that defeated the point of the connection — build the quote through Claude, then re-enter every line by hand in the app.
Three things changed.
- A code is now looked up. Give Claude a part number and it finds the matching catalogue item and links the line to it. Capitalisation and stray spaces are ignored, because a code read off a distributor's PDF rarely matches your catalogue exactly. If a code matches more than one item, Claude refuses rather than picking one — two items whose codes differ only in capitalisation can carry different prices, and guessing would put a price on your customer's quote that nobody chose.
- You can name the item directly, instead of relying on the code.
- A part number that is not in the catalogue can be added as you go, if you ask for it — and doing so requires you to say which revenue account it posts to. An item added without one would be linked and still uncategorised, which is the same problem one step further down.
Existing quotes are unaffected; this changes lines added from now on.
A quote now tells you when a line is not linked
The reason this went unnoticed for so long is that nothing said anything. So, in the same spirit as the cost reporting added last release:
- Every quote now reports how many of its lines are not linked to a catalogue item.
- Asking Claude to mark a quote as sent or approved shows you that count before you confirm.
- Adding a line tells you straight away whether it linked, and what to do if it did not.
A line with no catalogue item is not always a mistake. Labour, travel, project management and one-off charges have no catalogue entry and never will, so nothing is blocked — you are told, and you decide.
Find the products that need a revenue account
Linking the line is necessary but not sufficient: the catalogue item it links to also needs a revenue account, or the line still reaches Xero uncategorised.
Correction (v0.41.0): this section originally said that in one organisation we looked at, not one catalogue item had a revenue account set. That was wrong. The figure came from reading the catalogue through a tool that could not report the field at the time, so it saw nothing and reported that as a finding. Most items already had one. Some products do still need accounts, and v0.41.0 adds the read that tells you which.
So this release also makes that fixable from a conversation:
- Claude can look up your chart of accounts, to find the right revenue account by code or name. It can read them; it cannot create or change an account. Adding an account is a bookkeeping decision, and it stays in the app.
- Claude can set a product's sales and purchase accounts, and read them back.
- Your product list now shows which items are missing a revenue account, so you can ask Claude which products still need one and work through them. Ask for all items, not just active ones — a discontinued product can still be quoted, so it can still land uncategorised.
If you use the Xero sync and care about revenue by category, that catalogue pass is worth doing before you rely on the new linking — the two only give you correct categorisation together.
Also in this release
- A product's end-of-life status was always blank when read through the connection. Asking Claude whether a product was end-of-life got you nothing, whatever the product's real status — it was reading a field that did not exist. It now reports the real value.
- A quote line's part number is now kept consistent with the item it is linked to. If you link a line to a catalogue item, the printed part number is set to that item's code. This matters more than it sounds: a printed code that disagreed with the linked item was silently broken by the next save from the app, which created a duplicate catalogue entry and pointed the line at it. If you want to annotate a line — a term, a renewal period, anything beyond the part number itself — put it in the line's description or notes, which are yours to write freely.
- Quoting a discontinued product now tells you rather than refusing. The line is linked, so the accounting is right, and you get a note so you can check it was deliberate.