Categories

Discover how to organize similar items into groups for searching and reporting purposes.

What you’ll learn in Categories

• Create categories and assign them to items
• Use categories as filters

Video Transcript

Welcome to our video, Using categories. Categories are a means of grouping similar items together in SOS Inventory. For example, let’s assume that your company carries a variety of lamps. All those lamps are scattered throughout the Items list. Creating a category called lamps is a means of grouping all of them so that they appear together in the list, as well as on some reports that allow filtering by category. Categories also sync with QuickBooks Online.

This presentation will show how to create categories and assign them to items. We will also cover how to use categories as filters for searches, reports, and data exports.

Categories are classified as a type of item in SOS Inventory, so they are created using an item page. To open a new item page, go to the Task Bar’s Add Menu and select Item under the Inventory section—or select Items under the Inventory section of the Operations Menu and then select Add New on the Items list.

The only fields on an item page that are relevant for creating a category are Name, Description, and Type. Enter the name of the new category in the Name field. Completing the Description field is optional. Under Type, select Category, then Save and Close. Your new category will appear in the Items list.

The new category also will be added to the dropdown list of choices for the Category field on an Item page. You can then assign new and existing items to the category as needed. Additionally, you can create a new category and assign it under another category, making this new category a sub-category. Up to three levels can be assigned: the main category and two sub-categories.

SOS Inventory allows you to use categories to filter data:

• On the Items list, you can use the Change Filter feature to specify a category as one of the filters for displaying items.
• On some reports and data exports that pertain to items, you can choose to filter the results by category.

This concludes our tutorial on Using Categories. Thank you for watching this presentation!