What a hosted catalog is
A hosted catalog holds items you create and maintain yourself: description, unit, supplier, price, category. Requesters pick an item instead of naming a vendor, which is the whole point.
It is the only catalog type available on every plan, and it is where every team should start.
The benefits, in the order you will feel them
The first benefit is speed, and it shows up in week one. The rest compound over the following quarters.
- No more email threads to re-ask a supplier for a price you already agreed
- One item code per thing, so spend aggregates by category instead of scattering across vendors
- Requesters stop choosing suppliers, which quietly ends most maverick buying
- Prices become reviewable — you can see when an item last changed
- The data is yours and stays yours, independent of any supplier relationship
Start with 20 items, not 2,000
The failure mode is scope. Teams try to catalog everything, the project stalls at 15% loaded, and nobody trusts the list. Pick the 20 items your team requests most often this quarter and load only those.
A catalog covering 20 items that people use beats a catalog covering 2,000 items that people ignore.
- Pull the top items by transaction count, not by value
- Confirm the price with the supplier once, in writing
- Set the unit of measure carefully — this is where comparability breaks
- Assign a category so spend reporting works from day one
Keep it alive
A stale catalog is worse than no catalog, because it teaches people to look elsewhere. Give the list an owner and a quarterly review, and let the requests themselves tell you what to add: any item requested off-catalog three times is a candidate.
When maintenance starts to hurt, that is the signal to move the category to a supplier-managed catalog or punchout instead.