A material carries its name, item number, category, unit, what it costs you, what you charge, your markup, and a waste factor. It also carries the purchase unit and how much of your working unit comes in one, which is what lets you spec in square feet and shop in sheets without doing the conversion in your head at the counter. Set a reorder point and quantity, flag whether it is taxable, and point it at the store you actually buy it from.

• Name, item number, category, unit, cost, price, markup, and waste factor
• Purchase unit and coverage, so buying and using can be different units
• Recorded prices at specific store locations, the yard against the big box
• Reorder point and reorder quantity per material
• Each, linear feet, and board feet built in, plus your own unit types
• Archive a material instead of deleting it, so old documents still make sense

Standing in the aisle with something you have never bought before. Point the camera at the shelf tag, or pull an image out of your gallery, and the app reads the product name, item number, and price and offers to create or update the material. Check it, fix anything it got wrong, and save. When you correct a field, it learns that tag layout and reads it right next time.

• Reads product name, item number, and price off a shelf tag
• Camera or an image already on your phone
• Records which chain and location the price came from
• Creates a new material or updates one you already have
• Correct a misread field and the parser learns that layout
• Scanning runs on your phone, and photos never leave it. Sharing your corrections so everyone's scanner improves is a switch you turn on, and it stays off until you do.

Materials get recorded against the task they belong to, which is right for costing and useless at the lumber yard. A six-door job lists the same casing six separate times, once per door. The shopping list groups them, sums the real footage, and rounds up to whole purchase units, so you walk in knowing you need thirty sticks of 7-foot casing rather than doing the math six times over. It shows the exact underlying quantity behind each rounded number, so you can check the math standing at the truck, and you can copy the whole thing out.

• Every material on the job, grouped and totaled across tasks
• Rounded up to whole purchase units, the way you actually buy
• The real quantity shown behind each rounded number
• Copy the list out to send it or take it with you

Switch tracking on for a material, give it a starting count, and from then on every change is a movement rather than an edit. Stock added, stock removed, or an adjustment, each recorded with where it came from. So the count is not a number somebody typed, it is the sum of what actually happened, and you can read back through it when the shop count does not match.

• Turn tracking on per material, only where it is worth it
• Every change is a recorded movement with its source
• Additions, removals, and adjustments, from receipts, purchases, or by hand
• Delete a movement from the ledger when something was logged wrong
• An untracked view for bringing existing materials under tracking
• Reorder point and quantity so you know when you are getting low

Keep the chains you buy from and the individual locations under them, with store numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and websites. Search it, or hand an address to your maps app and go. Materials point at a preferred chain and location, and prices are recorded per location, so the catalog can tell you what a thing costs at the yard against what it costs at the big box.

• Chains and their individual locations, with store numbers
• Address, phone, and website per location
• Directions handed straight to your maps app
• A preferred chain and location per material
• Prices recorded against the location they came from