Getting Started with Materials

Approve your first material — from finding it in the catalogue to opening stock against it in Resources.

This walkthrough takes one material from the catalogue to a stocked inventory item. It's the sequence you'll repeat at the start of every project, usually in one sitting as the specification gets signed off.

Quick Summary

Add vendors in Resources first if you want to name suppliers
Admin → Approved Materials → Add Approved Material
Pick a catalogue item — quick search, or browse division → subcategory → material
Record the manufacturer (required), plus brand, suppliers and remarks
Approve Material — the record is created with its own MS- number
Resources → Inventory → Add to Inventory to start tracking stock

Before You Begin

Prerequisites

You need full material permissions to open Admin → Approved Materials. If it isn't in your sidebar, ask an organisation owner.
Open it on a desktop — the Admin screens are hidden at phone width.
If you want to name approved suppliers, add those vendors first under Resources → Vendors. The supplier picker only lists this project's vendors, and it doesn't appear at all when the project has none.

The Walkthrough

Open Admin → Approved Materials

In the sidebar, open the Admin group and click Approved Materials. On a new project this is empty, with the prompt "Add your first approved material from the catalog — specify manufacturer and supplier."

Click Add Approved Material at the top right.

The admin Approved Materials register with the Add Approved Material button top right — Admin → Approved Materials — where approvals are created

Find the material in the catalogue

The dialog opens on the catalogue. You have two ways in, and they do the same job:

Quick search — type a name, code or spec. Hyphens and spaces are treated the same, so ready mix finds Ready-Mix. The list shows up to 30 matches.
Browse — the three columns are Division, Subcategory and Material. Each division and subcategory shows how many items sit inside it, so you can see where the depth is before you click.

The Add Approved Material dialog in browse mode with a division and subcategory selected and materials listed — Browse by division when you know the trade but not the item name

Record the manufacturer, brand and suppliers

Once you pick an item it collapses into a summary card — name, spec, unit, code and a division badge — with a Change button if you grabbed the wrong one. The rest of the form appears underneath.

Manufacturer is the only required field. Brand / Trade Name is worth filling in when the site knows the material by its trade name rather than the maker's. Click vendor names under Approved Supplier(s) to tick them, and use Remarks for the condition attached to the approval — a test certificate reference, a batch restriction, a client instruction.

Manufacturer is required — everything else is optional but useful

Approve the material

Click Approve Material. The record is created immediately with the next number in the project's sequence — MS-001, MS-002 — and appears in the register with an Approved badge.

Repeat for the rest of the specification. Most teams do a batch in one pass at project start and add to it as the design settles.

Check what the project sees

Click Approved Materials in the main sidebar — outside the Admin group — to see the register the way everyone else does: submittal number, material, CSI code, category, manufacturer, suppliers, unit and approval date — hover a material for its spec, and bring back the Spec and Brand columns from Display. It's read-only, and every role on the project can open it.

The project-facing Approved Materials register with seven columns of approved material detail — What the rest of the project sees — no editing, just the list of record

Open stock against the approval

Go to Resources → Inventory and click Add to Inventory. Pick the approval from the Approved Material dropdown, set the unit rate, and optionally a planned quantity. The dialog shows the approval's category, unit, manufacturer and suppliers, and the new inventory item takes its name, spec, unit, category and approved suppliers from it. The manufacturer and brand stay on the approval.

From then on, deliveries and usage move the stock. Full detail is in Adding Materials.

The Add to Inventory dialog in Resources with the Approved Material dropdown open, listing the one approval not yet in inventory — The hand-off: only approvals not yet in inventory are listed

Skip a step when a delivery is already at the gate

If the material is approved but not yet in inventory, Resources → Deliveries → New Delivery lists it under Approved Materials (not in inventory) and the button reads Add to Inventory & Record Delivery — one action creates the inventory item and logs the delivery.

Approving a material — the dialog field by field
The materials catalogue — divisions, subcategories and search
Logging Deliveries — recording what arrives on site
Vendors — adding the suppliers you'll approve

Questions

I approved a material. Why can't the site log usage against it yet?

An approval only says the material is allowed on the project. Stock is tracked once it's in inventory: use Add to Inventory in Resources → Inventory, or record its first delivery with Add to Inventory & Record Delivery. Log Usage only lists materials that are in inventory.

Do approvals carry over to my other projects?

No. Each project has its own register and its own MS- numbers. The catalog is shared across your organisation, so the same material is quick to find on another project, but you approve it there separately.

Can I approve the same material from two manufacturers?

Yes. Approve it twice, once for each manufacturer. Each approval gets its own MS- number and can go into inventory as its own item, so stock from the two makers is counted separately.