What is the Product Library feature and who should use it?
The Product Library is a centralized source of truth for all products and services offered by your business. It allows you to build a structured catalog with consistent data for quotes, invoices, and subscriptions. This feature is ideal for sales teams, finance departments, and operations personnel who need to ensure accuracy and consistency when presenting and pricing goods and services to customers on the Hoop platform.
Using a single, controlled catalog greatly improves operational efficiency. Consistency helps improve your margins and forecasting, leading to a better overall customer experience.
How does the Product Library help ensure fast, error-free quoting?
The Product Library streamlines the quoting process by centralizing approved pricing and product configurations. This prevents manual errors and pricing inconsistencies across your entire team.
The quoting functionality offers several key benefits when using your centralized product data:
- Insert approved line items directly with a single click.
- Automatically calculate all taxes, discounts, and final totals.
- Eliminate typos and prevent unauthorized pricing drift among sales teams.
By enforcing these guardrails, the Hoop platform helps you maintain profitability and quote with confidence.
What Hoop pricing plans include access to the Product Library?
The Product Library is a foundational capability available across multiple Hoop pricing tiers to support businesses of all sizes. The feature is available for users on the core, pro, and enterprise plans.
While the basic function is available in core, more advanced features like granular permissions and extensive analytics are typically reserved for the pro and enterprise plans. Companies with complex catalogs, multiple regions, or extensive compliance needs will benefit most from the advanced features included in the higher-tier subscriptions.
How does the Product Library facilitate easy maintenance and price changes?
Maintenance is simplified because you only need to update product information once for it to propagate everywhere. If you change a price, new quotes automatically inherit the updated value.
Effective dates are a critical component of maintenance, allowing you to:
- Plan future price increases without surprising your sales team or customers.
- Maintain clear version history for auditing purposes.
- Ensure that older, issued quotes retain the original prices quoted to the customer, preventing retrospective billing issues.
This automated system ensures your sales documents always reflect the current, approved pricing.
What control features and analytics does the Product Library offer?
The Product Library provides robust controls and powerful analytics necessary for managing a healthy product portfolio. These features give administrators full visibility and governance over the catalog.
The built-in analytics and controls allow you to:
- Track top sellers and analyze attachment rates between products and services.
- Enforce strict discount and margin guardrails to protect profitability.
- Audit all changes meticulously using comprehensive version history.
These controls ensure that your catalog remains accurate and compliant with internal policies, a crucial feature within the Hoop platform.
How is product data secured and who is allowed to edit the catalog?
Security is managed through a comprehensive system of user roles and approval workflows, ensuring data integrity and controlling who can make changes to the master catalog. Access to product data within Hoop is strictly permission-based.
To govern catalog changes, you can:
- Assign specific roles that limit editing privileges to only authorized personnel.
- Implement approval flows for any new product additions or significant price changes.
- Maintain a detailed audit trail that logs every change, along with who made it and when.
This governance structure keeps your sensitive product information secure and guarantees that only verified items are used in customer interactions.