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Managing Categories

Creating categories to assign your products and services will enable fine-grained sales performance reporting capability, and optimise your assignment of products and services to invoice. Expense categories are also an essential tool to determine key operating areas of your day to day business and identify savings. Additionally, for expenses, you can assign a payment source for later consoliation, such as a credit card, paypal or cash.

This guide explains how to create and edit:

  • Inventory categories
  • Expense categories
  • Spending source categories

Inventory Categories

Inventory categories can be used to group products and services into a collections in a way that suits your business. As a simplified example, for an IT business, assigning Software products to one category and Hardware Products to another.

Categories can be colour coded and filtered from your inventory, and add the advantage of sales performance reporting capability on that grouping of products over any time span you choose.

1
Login to your business toolkit

If you are unsure where or how to do this, refer to the accessing your toolkit guide.

2
Click the SETUP link in the navigation toolbar.
3
Click Inventory from the Setup navigation panel, under the Categories heading.
4
The inventory page is displayed, detailing categories configured, and any associated colour code you may have assigned.

Categories cannot be deleted if a product or service is assigned to that category, to ensure database and reporting integrity.

5
To add a new category, click the Add Category button.

A pop up window is displayed prompting for input.

6
Input your new category name, and click Create Category.

A confirmation prompt is displayed, indicating your change was successfully saved.

7
The category list returns to focus. Optionally, you can now click edit to assign a colour to this category by toggling the option to on, and selecting a colour.
8
Inventory line items assigned to this category will now have the associated colour assigned to the category text.

For help creating and assigning inventory items to categories, refer to the Managing Inventory guide.

Expense Categories

Expense categories are an essential tool to track key areas for reduced spending. OSO Books supports parent and nested subcategories to enable fine grained reporting. For example, an IT Business may have a parent category of Renewables, with subcategories of SSL Certificates and Domains

This guide assumes you are already logged into your toolkit and in the SETUP section.

1
Click Expenses from the Setup navigation panel, under the Categories heading.
2
The expenses page is displayed, detailing categories configured.

Categories cannot be deleted if a product or service is assigned to that category, to ensure database and reporting integrity.

3
To add a new parent category, click the Add Category button. Alternatively, to create a new subcategory, click the Add Sub category button.

A pop up window is displayed prompting for input.

4
Input your new category name, and click Create Category. If creating a subcategory, a selection box for the parent category is also displayed.

A confirmation prompt is displayed, indicating your change was successfully saved.

8
Expense items can now be assigned to this category.

For help creating and assign expense items to categories, refer to the Managing Expenses guide.

Spending Source Categories

Track expenses to the source you used to pay for them for easy account reconciliation. Within OSO Books, these are referred to as the 'Account'. For example, if you have an AMEX credit card you commonly use for expenses, label your account category accordingly and then link it to expenses made with that card.

1
Click Accounts from the Setup navigation panel, under the Categories heading.
2
The account page is displayed, detailing spending categories configured.

Categories cannot be deleted if an expense is assigned to that category, to ensure database and reporting integrity.

3
To add a new category, click the Add Category button.

A pop up window is displayed prompting for input.

4
Input your new account name, and click Create Category.

A confirmation prompt is displayed, indicating your change was successfully saved.

5
Expense items can now be assigned to this category.

For help creating and assign expense items to categories, refer to the Managing Expenses guide.

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