Your product catalog is a living, bleeding mess.
Every AV integrator, security installer, and systems-contractor we work with has the same data problem: keeping up with vendor pricelists. New pricelists land every month from dozens of vendors, each in their own format (Excel, PDF, CSV, email attachment, vendor portal download). Each one needs to be normalized, validated, cross-checked against existing items, and loaded into Q360 without breaking open quotes or corrupting the product master.
Most shops handle this by dedicating one person half-time to "pricelist management" — which means that person spends 20 hours a week opening Excel files, copy-pasting, and praying they don't make a mistake that propagates into customer quotes.
Every week a pricelist isn't updated, your quotes are wrong by some amount. Over a quarter, that turns into lost margin (old costs against new invoice prices) and failed projects (specs that use discontinued parts). Most shops don't know the magnitude until they do an audit.
Rubi's pricelist management service.
We take the entire pricelist ingestion and maintenance workflow off your plate. Your vendors send pricelists to us. We clean them, normalize them, load them into Q360, and publish the results to your product master on a cadence you control. You get accurate, current, audited pricing — without burning an internal FTE.
Your vendors send pricelists to us. We land them clean in Q360. You stop losing margin to stale data.
Three phases of the engagement.
Technology stack.
- Q360 API — all writes to your product master go through Q360's API, not direct SQL. No risk of breaking Q360's internal state.
- Q360 Live Data — we use Live Data for reads and verifications, so validation queries don't impact your operational database performance.
- Proprietary pricelist normalization tool — our internal engine handles the dozens of vendor-specific pricelist formats, maps each one to a canonical schema, and runs the cleanup rules. (Public-facing version coming soon.)
What ongoing maintenance looks like.
- Vendor sends pricelist to us. Could be email, FTP, shared drive, vendor portal download — whatever your existing vendor relationships already use.
- We normalize it. Convert to canonical format, apply manufacturer name normalization, flag any new or changed items.
- We validate against Q360. Cross-check every row against your current master. New items go through typing and categorization rules; existing items are price-compared for changes.
- We stage the change set. You get a report summarizing "X new items, Y price changes, Z items going EOL" so nothing ever lands in production without review.
- You approve (usually takes 2 minutes). One click of approval; the changes apply to the Q360 production master through the API.
- Audit log. Every change is logged — who submitted it, when we processed it, when it hit production, what the before and after values were.
What this saves your team.
- 20+ hours per week of internal time reclaimed — no more dedicated "pricelist person"
- Faster, more accurate quotes — your sales team is always quoting against current cost and current SKUs
- Margin protection — price increases flow through within days, not weeks
- Audit trail — every change to every price with a full history, useful for vendor disputes and customer pricing questions
- Acquisition-friendly — if you acquire another shop, we absorb their product master into yours as part of the normal cleanup process
Frequently asked questions.
All of them. Our normalization engine has templates for dozens of AV, security, and low-voltage vendors, and we add new templates within a few days of encountering a new format. No vendor is "too unusual" for us.
Phase 1 and Phase 2 are one-time project fees based on the size of your master and vendor count. Phase 3 (ongoing maintenance) is a monthly subscription tied to vendor count and processing volume. Usually a small fraction of the internal FTE cost.
Absolutely. We never touch your database directly — every change goes through your approval before hitting Q360. You can pause, audit, or override any step at any time.