Creating, editing and managing your Categories
Product categories allow for you to classify which section of your inventory and sales your products fall under. For example, it will allow for you to take a particular piece of clothing and assign it a category such as "Athletic Wear" or "Athletic Footwear" for reporting purposes. To begin doing this, we start from the Manage Categories section of Store Operations as shown below.
Root Categories
MicroBiz organizes categories under two root categories: Inventory and Services (as shown in the image below).
The categories in the 'Services' category tree are used to assign categories to non-inventory products. You cannot assign categories that are in the Services category tree to simple or matrix products.
Similarly, the categories in the 'Inventory' category tree are used to assign categories to simple and matrix products. You cannot assign categories that are in the Inventory category tree to non-inventory products.
The names of the root categories (Services and Inventory) should not be changed.
Categories & Subcategories
The categories located within the main root are referred to as categories and subcategories. These can be something such as "Clothing" or "Athletic Wear" and placed in either your "Inventory" root category for simple and matrix products or your 'Services' root category for non-inventory products.
Adding Categories
To add a new category, click on a category node that is one level above where you want to add a new category. Then click on the "Add Category" button. This will add a new category node named 'New Category' to the tree one level below the node selected. You can then use the 'Edit Category' box to change the name of the category to the name desired.
Once you have changed the name of the category, press on the 'Save' button. The same goes for adding "Sub-Categories". Simply click on the category node that you would like the Sub-Category to be added to, and click "Add Category" button. Edit the name of the 'New Category' node added, press the save button - and you are done!
Main Categories - Why they Matter
If we are counting sales - or even exporting sales to our General Ledger we wouldn't want to count the sale of a sneaker twice in both the sneaker and basketball categories. Nor would we want to omit any sales because a product had no category. For this reason we designate one root category as the inventory root category and one root category as the non-inventory root category. Each product has to belong to at least one 'main category' under the root inventory (or non-inventory) category.
How you approach your primary categories is particular to your business but as a guideline how you think about your inventory when you are planning your seasonal or annual buying budget is probably a good start.
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