Master Items: A Reference List for Recurring Devices

“Dell Latitude 5430” is a product. “Dell Latitude 5430, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, i7-1265U” is a different product. Free-text product names hide that difference, and the fifteenth typo variant hides it best. The master items catalog at /settings/core/catalog is where a tenant writes down the device types it receives over and over as structured rows, so the team describes the same device the same way every time.

What lives on a master item

A master item is a brand, a model, an optional variant, a category, a set of default specifications and an active flag. That is the whole row, and it is deliberately small: it is a template for describing a device type, not a pricing record and not a photo album. The catalog page lets your team search, filter by category, add and edit items, toggle the active state and delete items where that is allowed.

Tenant-scoped, tenant-maintained

The catalog belongs to the tenant. Each organization builds and maintains its own list under Settings > Core > Catalog; there is no shared platform list underneath it, so an ITAD focused on industrial printers and one focused on Apple laptops each keep a catalog that looks like their own dock. Start with the devices you receive most often. When a search comes up empty, clear the filters before you create a duplicate — the second row for the same model is how the free-text problem sneaks back in wearing a structured badge.

What the catalog isn’t

It isn’t the asset inventory. The asset is the specific device with a serial number; the master item is the product specification. One master item, many assets. The platform separates them deliberately so an asset’s state (sold, retired, in-testing) doesn’t leak into the catalog metadata. A row in the catalog describes a kind of thing. A row in inventory is the thing.