Product catalog

The product catalog defines what you sell and how it is priced. Every downstream system — quoting, subscriptions, invoicing, entitlements, revenue recognition, analytics — should read from it rather than maintain its own copy.

Flat catalogs do not survive B2B

The critical structural question is whether the catalog supports hierarchy. A flat catalog treats every sellable thing as a standalone entry with a price. A hierarchical catalog separates the product (what it is) from the plan (a packaged set of charges at particular rates) and from the charges within it (recurring, usage, one-off).

Flat catalogs work until the first custom deal. Then the only way to represent “Enterprise, but at $34 per seat instead of $40” is a new catalog entry. Do that a hundred times and nobody can answer what the standard price of anything is, reporting by product becomes impossible, and a price change requires editing hundreds of near-identical records.

Overrides belong on the subscription, not in the catalog

The structural fix is that negotiated terms — a discounted rate, a ramp, a timed discount, a custom threshold — are applied at the subscription or quote level as overrides against a clean catalog entry.

That keeps one canonical definition of each plan, makes “what did we discount and by how much” a reportable question, and means a list-price change propagates to everyone who is not explicitly overridden.

Getting this right early is disproportionately valuable, because catalog structure is the hardest thing to change later — every existing subscription references it.