How to Automate Houzz Pro

A Houzz Pro project hangs off the products a designer clips

Houzz is best known as the site homeowners browse for ideas. Houzz Pro is the business software the company sells to the people they hire: interior designers, builders, remodelers and architects. For a design studio it holds the whole project, and most of it hangs off products the designer has clipped.

Every product on a project starts as a clip. The designer saves it from a vendor's site into the studio's Product Library, puts it on a mood board, then on a Selection Board where the client comments and approves it with a click. The Selections Tracker follows every approved item after that, with its specs, vendor, costs and order status, and the client follows the project in the Client Dashboard, a branded page for its updates and invoices.

Every order on a design project lives on a different vendor's portal

A living room with forty line items from a dozen vendors is an ordinary project. One showroom confirms an order with a PDF; another only updates its trade portal. The sofa's lead time slips from ten weeks to fourteen, and only the vendor's portal says so. The lamp reaches the receiving warehouse with a cracked base, and the warehouse's report sits unread in a shared inbox.

The design assistant gives Mondays to the portal round, logging in vendor by vendor and updating the Selections Tracker by hand. Freight tracking numbers arrive in shipping emails and get pasted into a carrier's site one at a time. Before each order goes out, the designer rechecks the vendor's trade price, because the price the Clipper captured in March may not be the price in June. A week before install, the backorder comes to light when the client asks where the sofa is.

The Selections Tracker only knows what someone typed into it

The AI Clipper pulls a product's pricing, specs and images from the vendor's site, and a product clipped once carries them into proposals and invoices without retyping. Invoice line items convert into purchase orders in one click, and the POs sync with the Selections Tracker and the Budget tool.

Invoices carry payment schedules, clients pay them online, and Houzz Pro sends reminders for upcoming or overdue payments. Financial documents sync one way to QuickBooks Online every five minutes.

Houzz Pro exports a purchase order as a PDF with every detail the vendor needs, and the studio emails it. From then on the Selections Tracker shows whatever status the team last clicked: updating an item takes a couple of clicks, once somebody has learned the new status somewhere else. Order confirmations, freight tracking and the receiving warehouse's reports arrive by email and on vendors' portals, and the design assistant carries each one into the tracker by hand. A vendor's price rise after the clip stays on the vendor's site until a person goes and looks.

Vendors' ship dates and warehouse reports reach the Selections Tracker daily

A designer can tell the client about the sofa's new fourteen-week lead time the day the vendor's portal shows it, and click the new date into its Selections Tracker line. The design assistant can query a vendor the day its confirmation arrives if it shows a different finish or quantity from the one on the PO.

The procurement coordinator gets each shipment's carrier status from the tracking numbers in vendors' emails, and can reorder the cracked lamp the day the receiving warehouse writes it up, with the report already matched to its project and its line on the tracker.

A week before install, the designer can confirm the install date or move it, with every item for the room marked in hand or missing and the vendor's latest date against each missing one. Before a purchase order goes out, the principal can put a vendor's price rise since the proposal onto a change order instead of absorbing it in the studio's margin.

Every order change goes through a designer's click

Each vendor's trade portal shows ship dates and backorders only to a signed-in trade account, and a studio holds one account per vendor.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. The open purchase orders in Houzz Pro are its list: the agent logs in to each trade account, reads the inbox for confirmations, shipping emails and warehouse reports, and reports what has moved.

It never places or changes an order. A new date goes onto the Selections Tracker only when a designer clicks it in, and a delay note for a client waits in the designer's email drafts, in the designer's own words to edit. Every job here begins with an open purchase order in Houzz Pro.