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Proof a catalogue against your source table

The goal: before a leaflet or catalogue goes to print, verify every product on it against your master spreadsheet — titles, codes, prices, discounts, descriptions — page by page — so no wrong price or missing product ever reaches a customer. Routario finds the problems, lets you send the graphics studio a marked-up PDF, and tracks the fixes across rounds until the whole catalogue is clean.

This is acceptance-checking against a spec: your spreadsheet is the source of truth, the PDF is the draft, and you’re the reviewer signing it off for print.

What you need

Section titled “What you need”
  • The source table — your master spreadsheet of products (Excel or CSV): codes, names, prices, descriptions. This is what everything is checked against.
  • The artwork — the leaflet or catalogue as a PDF. Routario reads each product tile off the page.

Start a check

Section titled “Start a check”
  1. Open Match and select New check.
  2. Give it a name (for example, June leaflet vs price list).
  3. Choose the recipe — the method that says how the two sources are matched and which values are compared. For a catalogue, pick your catalogue-proofing recipe.
  4. Add the two sources: the Master — the source of truth (your spreadsheet) and the artwork PDF you want to verify.
  5. Select create. Routario reads both files and runs the comparison.

You land on the page-by-page review.

Read the review

Section titled “Read the review”

The top of the page shows the headline numbers:

  • Products — how many products your spreadsheet expects, and how many tiles were found on the leaflet. When these differ, a page has an extra or a missing product.
  • Clean — products that fully check out, and how many still need a look.
  • Not filled yet — products with a blank price still to be filled in (see Not filled vs wrong below).
  • Pages to reconcile — how many pages aren’t signed off yet.

Below that, each page is its own section with a status:

  • Page OK — every product on the page checks out and the counts line up.
  • Needs a look — one or more products have a problem.
  • Counts differ — the leaflet has more or fewer tiles than the spreadsheet expects for that page.

Each product row carries a plain-language status — OK, Title differs, Value differs (a price is filled but wrong), SKU mismatch, Missing from leaflet, Extra on leaflet, Not filled yet, or Advertising (a promo tile, excluded from the product totals).

See it on the page

Section titled “See it on the page”

Switch the view (top right) from By page to Annotated page. Routario renders each real catalogue page with a coloured box drawn over every product tile — green for clean, red or amber for a problem, blue for not filled yet. It’s the fastest way to see, at a glance, which corner of a busy spread still needs work. Select any tile to open its detail.

Open a product

Section titled “Open a product”

Selecting a product opens its check bundle — every checked field side by side, labelled by which source it came from (for example Leaflet (PDF) vs Source table (XLS)), with the leaflet’s page shown alongside so you can see the tile in context. It lists each SKU (matched, missing, or extra), the title and description checks, and the price checks. Copy any SKU code with one click, and step to the next or previous product without going back to the list.

Not filled vs wrong

Section titled “Not filled vs wrong”

Routario checks every value in two steps: is it filled in? and only then does it match? — because you can’t compare a blank. That gives two clearly different kinds of problem, and both keep a catalogue from being signed off:

  • Not filled yet — a price the studio still has to type in (the leaflet shows a placeholder like XXX Kč), or a value your source table is still missing. It’s a to-do, not a mistake.
  • Value differs — a price or title that is filled in but doesn’t match the source table. That’s a mistake to fix.

A draft leaflet full of placeholder prices honestly reads as not done yet rather than silently passing — so “every page is green” really means every page is ready for print.

Send the studio a marked-up PDF

Section titled “Send the studio a marked-up PDF”

Select Export PDF. Routario gives you back the leaflet with a native comment pinned to each problem tile, carrying a short, actionable instruction (“fill in the price”, “149 → should be 129”). It opens in any PDF reader as a normal comment list — the studio steps through it comment by comment and ticks each off as they fix it, exactly the way they already review artwork.

Track it across rounds

Section titled “Track it across rounds”

A catalogue usually takes several rounds with the studio before it’s clean. Open the Proofing Job (from the review) to see the whole story:

  • Iteration history — every round the studio sent back, oldest to newest.
  • Open-item burndown — how the number of open problems shrinks each round. When it reaches zero, the catalogue is signed off for print.

When the studio re-sends the whole leaflet, upload it under Proof this iteration — Routario re-checks it against the same source table and advances the burndown. Because Routario tracks each product by its spreadsheet identity, a product’s status carries across rounds even when the studio moves it to a different page.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”