Documentation/ Master records and catalogues/ Families, raw materials and cost centres
Families, raw materials, cost centres and brands
Categories are the classification applied over the product master. Without them the master still works, but any grouped analysis, by family, by raw material or by cost centre, comes out empty.
Database › Product categories
On this page
The kinds of category
The screen is organised in three tabs, one per kind:
| Tab | What it groups | Depends on another |
|---|---|---|
| Family | The big blocks of buying: drinks, meat, cleaning, packaging. | No |
| Raw material | The detail inside a family: beef, salmon, olive oil. | Yes, it hangs off a family |
| Cost centre | The area the spend goes to: kitchen, front of house, maintenance. | No |
Each tab handles its own kind separately: its list, its search, its new entries and its export.
The hierarchy: family and raw material
Families and raw materials make two levels. A raw material cannot exist on its own: creating one means saying which family it belongs to, and the application insists on it.
Which matters for the order you work in: families first, raw materials after. And the same thing happens on a product's record: the raw material drop-down stays off until a family has been chosen.
Cost centres have no hierarchy: they are a flat list, independent of how the product is classified. They answer a different question, where is it used, rather than what is it.
Creating a category
- Go to the tab for the kind you are creating.
- Press the new category button.
- Type the name.
- If it is a raw material, choose the family it belongs to.
- Give the order, if you want to control where it sits in the lists.
- Save.
The application confirms the category was created. Editing and deleting work the same way, with deletion asking you to confirm by name.
The Order field
It decides where the category sits in the drop-downs. A small thing you appreciate in a big tree: it lets you put the three or four families that account for most of your buying at the top, instead of leaving everything alphabetical.
Leaving it empty is fine. Worth numbering in jumps, ten, twenty, thirty, so you can slot something in later without renumbering everything.
Importing from Excel
Building the tree by hand is slow. The import lets you upload the whole thing in one file.
The screen gives the format it needs: an Excel file with the columns type, name, parentName (for raw materials) and sortOrder.
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
type | The kind: family, raw material, cost centre or brand. |
name | The category's name. |
parentName | The name of the family it hangs off. Raw materials only; empty for the rest. |
sortOrder | Where it sits in the lists. |
There is a button to download the template, and it comes with examples of all four kinds and a raw material hanging off its family. It is the safest way not to get the column names wrong.
Before importing, the screen shows a preview with the rows it read and a count, so you can check the contents before anything is written.
In the file, a raw material's family is given by its name, written exactly as it is on its own row. One extra space or a different accent breaks the link.
Brands
The brand is the fourth classification a product takes, but it has no tab of its own on this screen. Brands are created by import: the template includes an example row of the brand kind.
Once created they behave like the rest: they appear on a product's record and in the bulk category assignment.
Exporting
Each tab exports its own list to Excel, with the same four columns as the import format. The file has the kind in its name, so you can tell the families from the raw materials.
It is good for two things: keeping a copy of the tree before you reorganise it, and preparing an import out of what already exists.
How to design the tree
A useful category tree is a small one. What we would advise:
- Few families. Eight to fifteen is usually enough. With forty families no report is readable.
- Raw materials with volume behind them. Creating a raw material for something you buy twice a year adds noise and no analysis.
- Stable names. Renaming a family breaks the continuity of your historical reports.
- Cost centres by who is responsible, not by product. The question they answer is who is spending, and it is that person who later looks at the figure.
Things that come up
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| It will not save a raw material | The family is missing, and it is required on that kind. | Choose the family in the drop-down. |
| The import does not link the raw materials | The family's name does not match its own row exactly. | Correct the text and import again. The preview helps you spot it. |
| There is no brands tab | Brands are not managed from this screen. | Create them by import, with the brand kind. |
| A product's drop-downs are still empty | The categories went into another tab, or the import failed. | Check each tab's list. |
| A category will not delete | Products are using it. | Empty the assignment in bulk with the clear option, then delete it. |