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Your Departments, Categories, and Vendors are elements of the system you need to have in place before you start adding products. It is likely the data for these will be migrated for you, but if you need to create any yourself, steps for each of these areas is provided in the video and in the text below. If you are in the onboarding process, it is important to remember we will migrate the products currently in your system, but moving forward, you will need to create all new products in Rain POS, as they will not be part of your migrated data.

 

Setting Up Your Departments

You can get to this part of the system by clicking Inventory > Departments.

Your Departments are the major divisions of the products you offer, and ideally should represent only the top levels of how you organize your products. They are primarily used for tracking revenues in those major areas, and in our system, you can also set permissions by department for products to generate reward points or to be eligible for discounts.

For your classes and any service-based work you might do, the system will track those two areas automatically for you, so you don't need to make a Department for either of those areas. Your Departments should only be products that you sell.

To begin setting up your Departments, click the +New Department button.

As with other parts of our system, items in bold green text are required before you can save the entry.

• Your Department Title should be descriptive wording that represents the overall group of your products.
• The Department Code can be anything you like; a single word, a short code, three letters, or even just a single number or letter. Whatever is most intuitive for you and your team will work here.
• If you use our Rewards Program, you can set whether products in the department are eligible to generate Reward Points upon purchase or not.
• If you wish for the products in the department to be Eligible for Discounts in the point of sale, you can set it for the whole department.
• If you wish for products in the department to be Eligible for Commissions, you can set that to be at the product level or department level here, with an area to set the default behavior for new products you add, as pictured below.
• You can set a department to be a Sub-Department of another one (e.g. Snowboards could be a sub-department of Snow Sports). Just remember that each product can actually be in only one department, so in the example given, the revenues for snowboards would not be counted as part of the revenues for the Snow Sports department.

 

Setting Up Your Categories

You can get to this part of the system by clicking on Website > Categories.

Your Categories allow you to organize your products down to whatever level of detail you like. As a general rule, it is shoot for Categories with around 50 items; larger numbers of items in a single category will require your visitors to sift through multiple pages of products, so avoid that if you can.

One thing that is helpful when organizing your strategy for your Categories is to write them out on paper and put thought into what your subcategories should be. Your products can be in multiple categories, so it is beneficial to organize them in the major ways that your customers will be searching for them. For example, having a waterproof flashlight in both your Camping category and your Dive Accessories category would make sense, and customers searching both of those areas could find what they are looking for more easily.

To begin setting up your Categories, click the + New Category button.

As with other parts of our system, items in bold green text are required before you can save the entry. Here is how to create a Category:

• Your Category Name should be descriptive wording that represents the overall group of your products.
• We highly recommend adding an Image if you will be selling your products on your website. The image does not need to be any larger than about 500 to 600 pixels in its largest dimension. JPG and PNG images are best.
• If you just want to provide a brief text outline of what you are offering for a category, the Short Description allows you to enter up to 256 characters, including spaces and punctuation. If you want more or if you want rich content such as images and even embedded videos, the long description allows for those. You can do both if you like, but the Long Description is the one that shows up once the customer has clicked to view the category page if both descriptions are present. The Short Description will be offered to search engines as the SEO Description for the category, if it is present. Otherwise, the first part of text in the Long Description is used.
• The Long Description is visible once a customer has clicked to view the category and the products in it, so it is a good place to do some marketing featuring your selection, superior service, or whatever bragging rights you have in that area.

 

Working With Subcategories

When setting up your Subcategories you will need to be careful that the new Subcategory you are creating is going in under the correct Category. Near the top of the window, you should see in large letters the name of the parent Category.

For example, if I am creating a Subcategory for Camping Tools under my Camping Gear category, I need to make sure that I see Camping Gear as the active Category at the top of the screen (see below) before I click the +New Subcategory button.

For more detail on working with your Categories, please click here: Product Categories - Setup and Organization.

 

Setting Up Your Vendors

You can get to this part of the system by going to Purchasing > Vendors.

If you don't need to track inventory numbers (i.e. if you are not using our POS system, or if you don't need our system to do Purchase Orders and Receiving Orders), then you will not need to set up Vendors unless you just want them associated with products for your reference.

To begin setting up your Vendors, click the +New Vendor button.

 

Details Tab

To begin setup of the Vendor, you will enter the appropriate information on the Details tab. The only required item (in green text) is the vendor name, the rest is for your reference and will be used when you create Purchase Orders and Receiving Orders. You do not need to click Save when you finish this part of the setup. To learn more about Vendor order integration click here: Vendor Purchasing Integration (this link will open in a new tab for you).

 

Account Info Tab

On the Account Info tab, it is recommended to put in your Account Number with the Vendor so that will automatically be listed for you when you do a Purchase Order with them from our system. All other items are purely your option. If you are setting up the Vendor for the first time, you will want to click Save after you finish the information on the Account Info tab.

 

The History Tab

This tab will keep a chronological listing of all orders you do with the Vendor. You will see listings for both Purchase Orders and Receiving Orders, and you can click on the PO Number for an order to view it.

 

Additional Functions

Once you have saved the Vendor, you will also have the ability as pictured above to create a New Purchase Order or a New Receiving Order for the Vendor. You can also click on the trash can button to Delete the vendor, if needed.

On the main Vendors screen, you can click on the Vendor ID to open their details. You can also click on the buttons to the right, as pictured above, to start a Purchase Order or Receiving Order with that Vendor.

Multiple Locations Account Info - If you have multiple Locations in Rain POS, you can have separate vendor accounts the system will use for each. So whatever account number code the vendor has given you for each of your Locations you can enter in the fields provided, as in the 2-Location example company below.

Vendor Integration - We have vendor integration with several vendors in the craft and sewing industries for automated ordering. We plan to add more vendor integrations in the future across multiple industries. They will be announced as they are launched in the System Updates you see on the system Home page when you log into the system.

Please Note: If you see an Integration tab as in the example above, please understand that it represents the first version of our vendor integration and is no longer being used. We will be removing it in the near future.