Overview
A procurement catalogue is a document that provides information on services and/or product offered by a vendor or service provider. The primary elements in a catalogue include product or service name, descriptions, hierarchy, prices, and internal codes. The catalogue defines which products are available when purchase requisitions are created, but you can use category access policies rules to apply additional restrictions.
A company’s purchasing department can create and maintain catalogues of the items and services that can be purchased for internal use in an organization. After catalogues are set up, company employees can create purchase requisitions to order from them. Before a procurement catalogue can be created, a procurement category hierarchy must be set up and vendors/products added to the procurement categories.
Purpose
Catalogues can be used to enforce purchasing policies so that employees can order only the items and services that are allowed for their buying legal entity. An organisation can have one catalogue for the whole organisation or multiple catalogues for various divisions of the business.
Example
A purchase ledger clerk of Company X plans to raise a purchase requisition for office stationery – A4 printer paper and envelopes. The procurement catalogue includes A4 printer paper which has an approved vendor (added to the procurement category). The line item is created for 4 (ea) A4 printer paper. On creating the second line item for paper, the clerk is unable to add paper because the vendor is not listed on the specified sub-category.
The Clerk advises the purchasing manager of this and once the updates are made, the item is now available to add.
In Dynamics 365
In Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, the hierarchy is inherited by the new catalogue, along with all the products that are in the hierarchy. A procurement catalog can be created in the Procurement and sourcing module under catalogues.
Before a catalog is available for employees to use in a requisition, you must set the catalog’s status to Active, and publish the catalog. You can inactivate catalogs that you no longer want to be available to your users. Products are inherited from the procurement categories, they all appear in the appropriate catalog nodes. You can control whether all products in a node are hidden or shown when the catalog is used in a purchase requisition.
Once the catalogue is created, it is made visible on the purchasing policies page by defining a catalogue policy rule under Setup.
