Overview:
Reporting categories are used to classify a product reporting purposes. A product can only be assigned to one category, sub-category etc to prevent double counting in reports
Creating, Editing and Managing your Categories
Creating, editing and managing categories allow for you to classify which section of your inventory and webpages 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" and "Athletic Footwear". To begin doing this, we start from the Recording Categories table, which can be accessed by Catalog >> Categories.
Create Categories & Subcategories
Categories are classified as either 'Main Categories' or 'subcategories' A root category a main type of category - such as "Inventory" or "Services". Try to limit main categories to less than five The secondary categories located within the main categories are referred to as subcategories. These can be something such as "Clothing" or "Athletic Wear" and placed in your "Inventory" main category.
Clicking on "Add Root Category" will allow for you to create more "Main Categories". As shown in the image above, simply fill in the name of the category and description if you'd like. The same goes for adding "Sub-Categories". Simply click on the Main Category you would like the Sub-Category to be added to and click "Add Child Category". Fill in the same information and you are done!
Deleting Categories
This is pretty simple. Just highlight a category or subcategory and press the Delete button above the category tree. Be sure to realize that this will remove the category from any product record associated with the deleted category and will have the option to re-assign it on another category.
Selecting Main Categories in Manage Products
When you create and edit a product, you can put the product in as many or as few categories as you would like.
The categories menu when editing a product shows you the primary categories. These particular categories are used for Reports. For example, this will be applied when closing a register or viewing a "Sales by Category" report. For more assistance, view the image below.
Main Categories - Why they Matter
MicroBiz Cloud allow the retailer flexible categories for products that are helpful to both retailers and their customers. A single product can belong to both a sneakers and a basketball categories. But many times we will want to be able to view inventory activity in a way that doesn't omit any products and never counts any of the products twice.
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.