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

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

Open Match and select New check.
Give it a name (for example, June leaflet vs price list).
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.
Add the two sources: the Master — the source of truth (your spreadsheet) and the artwork PDF you want to verify.
Select create. Routario reads both files and runs the comparison.

You land on the page-by-page review.

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).

Some kinds of goods are never in the price table by design: a grocer may price fresh produce, garden plants or counter goods separately, for example. The recipe can list those kinds. An AI model then reads the name of each printed product that has no table row, once per name, and decides whether it is one of them. A product it recognises is marked green, Priced outside the table, with the recipe’s note. Anything else, including a branded product the table simply lacks, stays Extra on leaflet and is reported.

A product your catalogue prints on more than one page gets a row on each of them, badged also on p. N, so a page always lists as many products as it prints boxes. It stays one product: the verdict reads the same on every row, accepting a deviation or ticking one off covers all of them, and the headline counts it once.

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

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.

Leaflets that print no codes

Some artwork prints a product code on every tile. A grocery leaflet usually prints none — just a name, a price, and a photo. Routario checks those the same way you would: by the price. It reads each tile’s price, unit price (1 kg = …) and pack size off the page and looks for the row of your price list that agrees with all of them.

Before the numbers are compared, a recipe can ask which rows a tile actually advertises. An AI model reads each tile’s printed caption beside the candidate rows and says which are that product — any flavour or pack the tile covers — and which only share a word with it (“Zlaté Mini” is not ZLATÉ VĚNEČKY). The numbers then settle the rest: a row two tiles name goes to the one whose price agrees, and a tile whose numbers disagree with its own row reads probably this row, but the numbers differ rather than not in the table. A row that is the same product under another brand than the tile prints is flagged, so a person decides which brand is right. When the client keeps a brand list — a data product with each brand, the spellings it goes by, its supplier in the table and its maker — the check also flags a misspelled brand line (“Kostlecké uzeniny”) and tells a producer printed over its own brand from a different brand. Tiles read from a page image are matched on the numbers alone.

How a chain writes its money is part of its recipe, not of Routario: the currency (it defaults to your workspace’s main currency under Settings → Currencies), the exact wording of the unit-price line (1 kg = 89,80 Kč, jednotková cena 4,19 EUR/kg, 100 g = 24,91 Kč), which printed figure a -20 % badge is measured against — the struck price, or the lowest-price-in-30-days line — and which small packs may go without a unit price. So is how it sets that money: whether the price is one figure with the comma inside it or a large integer with raised halere, which quantity a unit price is quoted per, how a multipack and a two-for-one are priced, and which words mark a figure as the price of two products sold together. A leaflet in another language, another currency or another typeface is a new recipe, not a new reader — Read a leaflet in another language or currency walks through those settings.

Two things work differently when there are no codes:

The unit of review is the printed tile, not the spreadsheet row. One tile very often covers several rows — three flavours under one photo at one price. So the headline counts are per tile: how many the leaflet prints, how many are OK, how many need fixing, and how many the price list never mentions. They always add up.
A named tile with no matching row is a question, not a mistake. If the recipe says that kind of product is priced outside the table (fresh produce, say), it is marked green instead. Anything else is shown so you can look, holds up sign-off, and is listed in the reply as not in the table.

You’ll also see one status that only appears here:

Not readable — Routario drew a box around a tile but couldn’t read its name off the artwork, or the tile prints a unit price (1 kg = …) that Routario saw but couldn’t tie to it, so that unit price went unchecked. That’s our gap, not the studio’s. It’s surfaced so you can check that corner of the page yourself, and it never goes out as an error in the leaflet.

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.

Check the discount the leaflet claims about itself

Some checks need no price list at all. When a tile prints a struck-through original price, a new price, and a -23 % badge, the leaflet has made a claim about itself — and arithmetic settles it.

Routario reads all three off the tile and recomputes the percentage:

Struck 29,90, now 22,90. That’s a 23 % cut, and the badge says -23 % — fine. Change the badge to -30 % and Routario flags it.

Chains normally round the badge down (15,90 from 21,90 is really 27.4 %, printed as -27 %), so Routario allows a point and a half of slack before it says anything. Anything wider is a real mistake in the artwork.

Because this check reads only the artwork, it runs on every discounted tile — including products your price list has never heard of.

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

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

Working with data: tables & imports — get your source table into Routario and keep it current.
Give a teammate or agent the right access — let the right people run and review checks.
Preview a file before saving it to Memory — handle the files that flow through a check.
Recipes: how a check knows what to compare — the method behind the check, and how to read it out loud when someone asks.