Categories & brands
Categories and brands are the two simple ways to group your products. A category says what kind of thing it is (Drinks, Snacks, Painkillers). A brand says who makes it (Coca-Cola, Cadbury, Bayer). Good grouping makes products faster to find and your reports far more useful.
Overview
A category is a folder for similar products. Categories can sit inside each other to form a simple tree — for example Beverages → Soft drinks → Cola — so a big catalog stays organised. A brand is a flat label for the maker of a product; there's no tree, just a plain list. A product can belong to one category and one brand at the same time.
You manage them on two screens that work much like the product list: a table you can search, with an Add button, a row to click for editing, and an active/inactive switch on each row.
Why it's useful
- Reports that mean something. Grouping lets you see sales by category and by brand — so you know whether it's the drinks or the snacks paying the rent.
- Faster to find items. Filtering the product list by a category or brand narrows thousands of items down to the handful you're after.
- A tidier till. Categories can group the product tiles on the touch screen, so staff find things quickly when there's no barcode.
- Less clutter as you grow. A small tree of categories keeps a big catalog manageable.
Setting up categories, step by step
-
Open Categories
Under Products in the sidebar, click Categories. You'll see your existing categories as a tree.
-
Add a top-level category
Click Add category, type a name (for example Beverages) and save. A short web-friendly version of the name — its slug — is created for you; you can edit it if you like.
-
Add sub-categories underneath
Add more categories and set their parent to an existing one to nest them — for example Soft drinks inside Beverages. You can go a few levels deep; keep it shallow so it stays easy to navigate.
-
Reorder by dragging
Drag a category up or down to change the order it appears in. Drag it onto another category to move it inside that one. The new order is saved as you go.
-
Assign products
Open a product (see Products) and pick its category. From then on the product is counted under that category everywhere — lists, filters and reports.
Brands
Brands are simpler. There's no tree — just a flat list of makers. Open Brands under Products, click Add brand, give it a name (and optionally a logo), and save. Then choose the brand on each product. Use brands when knowing the manufacturer matters for your reporting — common in pharmacies and electronics shops.
Ask "what is it?" for the category (Snacks, Antibiotics) and "who made it?" for the brand (Lay's, Pfizer). A product usually has both.
Tips & best practices
- Keep the tree shallow. Two or three levels is plenty. Deep trees are slow to click through and hard to remember.
- Set up categories first. Decide your main groups before adding lots of products, so each product has a home from the start.
- Don't over-split. A category with only one product in it rarely earns its place.
- Use brands for reporting, not decoration. Only add brands you'll actually want to filter or report on.
Notes & warnings
Filtering by a category includes everything underneath it. Filter the product list by Beverages and you'll see drinks in all its sub-categories too. There's a "direct children only" option if you want just that one level.
Moving a category moves its products' grouping. Re-parenting Soft drinks changes where those products roll up in your reports — useful, but worth knowing before you drag.
Related: Products · Units of measure · Reports