Catalog Accounts

An account_tree Account is a channel your organization sells through, such as a retailer, distributor, region, or customer (i.e. "Home Depot", "Lowes", "Canada").

Accounts answer two questions about every item in your catalog:

• Which items does this account carry? Users can filter the catalog down to only the items a given account handles, so they never plan a product that account cannot order.
• What does this account call the item? The same product usually has a different part number at each account. Accounts let you store all of those alternate IDs alongside your own.

Accounts are optional. If your catalog has no account columns, the Account dropdown in the app simply reads "No Accounts specified".

Setting Up Accounts in the Catalog Spreadsheet

Accounts are defined entirely by column headers in your catalog spreadsheet. Add one column per account, with the header AcctID_ followed by the account's name:

• The column header (i.e. AcctID_HomeDepot) creates the account.
• The cell value is that account's own product number for the item on that row.
• A blank cell means the account does not carry that item.

In this example both accounts carry the still water, but only Home Depot carries the sparkling 12-pack.

There is no limit on the number of accounts, and account columns can appear anywhere in the spreadsheet after the required ProductID column. Accounts do not need to be declared anywhere else. Uploading the spreadsheet is all that is required.

Accounts and Merchandising Styles

Each Merchandising Style of an item is filtered independently, so a variant can be carried by one account and not another (i.e. an account that only takes the "Tray" variant).

Remember that non-default merch style rows inherit any blank column from the item's default row. To mark a variant as not carried by an account that carries the default variant, that account's column must be blank on the default row and filled in only where it applies.

Changing Accounts Later

• Re-uploading your spreadsheet with added, renamed, or removed AcctID_ columns updates the accounts. See Catalog Editing.
• To change a single item, edit it from Admin → Catalogs and add or edit an AcctID_ property in its custom data section.
• Catalogs exported from Admin → Catalogs include every account column, so exporting is the quickest way to get a spreadsheet you can edit and re-upload.

What Users See

Once a catalog contains account data, an account_tree Account dropdown appears above the catalog in the app, listing every account found in the catalogs currently loaded in their plan. It affects:

• Catalog filtering: selecting one or more accounts narrows the catalog to items carried by any of the selected accounts.
• The AccountID field: when exactly one account is selected, each placed product's AccountID resolves to that account's product number, ready for use in labels and reports. With no account (or more than one) selected, it resolves to nothing.
• Unsupported items: a placed product that the selected account does not carry is flagged with a small red marker, so plans built for one account can be checked against another.
• Item list filters: users uploading a list of part numbers to filter the catalog can choose AccountIDs as the number type, which only works while an account is selected.