The materials catalogue and your rates

Price something once and reuse it, so two people never quote the same tile differently.

In this lesson

What the catalogue is for

Before Mostafa can price a bill of quantities, the studio needs one place where every material lives with its rate. That place is the materials catalogue, and it is shared across every job.

Each entry is more than a name. It carries a unit — square metre, piece, linear metre — and a cost in pounds, set once so the same tile is never quoted two different prices.

Smoked oak flooring, a terrazzo tile, a sheet of aged brass — scan the list and you are looking at the pallet of finishes the studio actually works with.

Price a material here and it is ready to drop straight onto any bill of quantities, on any project, at the rate you agreed with the vendor.

Adding one new finish

When a new finish is specified — a brass lever handle Salma has just drawn in — Mostafa adds it once, with its unit and its rate.

Save it, and the handle is now in the catalogue for every job from today. Nobody types its price again.

The cost of two rates is real: quote a client EGP 1,200 a square metre on the estimate and EGP 1,450 on the order, and the studio eats the gap on every metre laid.

A rate in the catalogue is a small thing that compounds. One agreed number, reused everywhere, is what keeps the estimate and the invoice telling the same story.

The habit that matters

One habit worth building: when a vendor confirms a price, update the catalogue the same day — not in a notebook, not in your head. A stale rate is a margin that has already gone.

What just happened

  1. What the catalogue is for

    Before Mostafa can price a bill of quantities, the studio needs one place where every material lives with its rate. That place is the materials catalogue, and it is shared across every job.

  2. Adding one new finish

    When a new finish is specified — a brass lever handle Salma has just drawn in — Mostafa adds it once, with its unit and its rate.

  3. The habit that matters

    One habit worth building: when a vendor confirms a price, update the catalogue the same day — not in a notebook, not in your head. A stale rate is a margin that has already gone.

Open materials Opens Taskity in your own project.

Next: Budget, committed, actual →

Put it into practice.

Boards, approvals, snags and client sign-offs — one platform your team will actually use.

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