PleoStack

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
  1. Add vendors in Resources first if you want to name suppliers
  2. Admin → Approved Materials → Add Approved Material
  3. Pick a catalogue item — quick search, or browse division → subcategory → material
  4. Record the manufacturer (required), plus brand, suppliers and remarks
  5. Approve Material — the record is created with its own MS- number
  6. 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

1

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 catalogue — specify manufacturer and supplier."

Click Add Approved Material at the top right.

Admin → Approved Materials — where approvals are created
2

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.
Browse by division when you know the trade but not the item name
3

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
4

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.

5

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 and spec, CSI code, category, manufacturer, brand, suppliers and unit. It's read-only, and every role on the project can open it.

What the rest of the project sees — no editing, just the list of record
6

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 hand-off — an approval becomes a tracked inventory item

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.

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