Labor Rates & Catalog

Labor Rates and Catalog Items are reusable presets you set up once and drop into documents whenever you need them. They save you from retyping the same prices and descriptions on every estimate and invoice. Both are managed under Settings → Price Book (see Account settings).

Labor Rates

A labor rate is a preset for billing your time. Each one has:

• Name — for example, “Standard labor” or “Senior tech.”
• Description — an optional default description for the line item.
• Hourly rate — what you charge per hour.

A few things to know:

• Labor rates are always billable — there’s no billable/non-billable setting.
• They’re used as a starting point for labor line items. When you insert a labor rate, you’ll still enter the hours before saving.

Catalog Items

A catalog item is a preset for anything that isn’t hourly labor — packaged products, materials, fees, travel, or fixed-price services. Each one has:

• Name
• Description
• Default item type — the kind of line it creates.
• Default unit price
• Active flag — keep current items active and hide ones you no longer use.

Catalog items are reusable presets you can drop into any estimate or invoice.

How snapshotting works

This is the most important thing to understand about presets:

Inserting a labor rate or catalog item copies its values into the estimate or invoice at that moment. Later edits to the preset do not change documents you already created.

So if you raise your hourly rate next month, your past invoices stay exactly as they were — they keep the price that was in effect when you created them. Only new documents pick up the new value. After inserting a preset, you can also freely edit the copied description, price, or quantity on that one document without affecting the saved preset.

How they speed up building documents

When you’re building an estimate or invoice, you can pull in your presets instead of typing line items from scratch:

• Insert a labor rate to start a labor line (then add the hours).
• Insert a catalog item to add a product, material, fee, travel, or service line with its price already filled in.

For the full line-item editor and how presets fit into it, see Estimates and Invoices.