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

Setting Up Your 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 and services. 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.

 

Departments vs. Categories

While your Departments should represent the largest groupings of your products, your Categories will be how you organize them for the website. If you don't use our website system, you will use Categories, they can be used to logically organize your products by type or style. So with your Categories, you will get down to very specific groupings of your products, and you can have your products in as many Categories as you like. For Departments, since they are used to track revenues for your products, a product can only be in one Department.

After you click on the Departments button (see image above), you can begin working with your list of departments. You can access the details of any department you have already set up by clicking on its name. You can also delete an unneeded department by using the delete button on the far right of the department's title bar.

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 pay commissions to your sales team for products in the department you can set it to be Eligible for Commissions. You can also choose whether new products created in the department will be eligible for commissions by default or not, 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.

 

Adding Products to Departments

After you have set all of your Departments up (and your Vendors and Categories!), once you start creating Products, you can add them to the appropriate Department in the Product Information tab of New Product screen:

When you set your Department, you will be informed of what Eligibility settings it has. If you don't need the reminder, you can dismiss the message if you like and you won't see them again. If the department is set to allow eligibility for rewards, discounts, and/or commissions, you will be able to set those elements on the Advanced Settings tab of the product, as pictured below. If you have set one or more of those elements to be fixed at the Department level, you will not be able to change the setting within the product, and that setting will be grayed out.