Create Categories & Subcategories

Main Categories and Subcategories are created in the screen we just navigated to.  A main category will be something labeled as Inventory or Services possibly, as shown in the image below.  The 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.  If this is a category you would like to show up in your Magento Instance, please click on the "Sync to Magento" radio button on the bottom. 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 Sub Category".  Fill in the same information and you are done!

Choosing Primary Inventory & Non-Inventory Categories

If you'd like to set the Primary Inventory and Non-Inventory Categories, you can do this by going to your System>Admin Settings menu.  In here you will notice a "General Settings" tab, click on this and then click on "Product".  As shown in the image below, you can simply select a category to be made for Inventory and Non-Inventory items.

 

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 left side of 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 & Magento 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.