Synopsis:
- How do I create product categories and customer groups in AdvancePro
- How do I add products to categories and customers to groups?
- How can i filter for these groups and categories in product screens and reports?
Webinar transcript
APT University: Product Categories and Customer Groups
Hello everyone and welcome to APT University, Today we’ll be discussing Product categories and customer groups, as well as their uses within AdvancePro.
To follow along with this presentation, you will need to already have some customers and products created in AdvancePro, For guides on how to do that, as well as all of our other APTU videos, you can visit the resources tab on localhost/apt, or our youtube channel, we have dozens of videos about how to get the most out of AdvancePro.
Moving to AdvancePro now, Let’s go to the products dashboard. Now we’ll see a button here called Manage categories, go ahead and click on it
Here we can create categories and sub-categories, and we can add products to categories manually. You can also add products to categories and sub-categories from an excel spreadsheet – take a look at our video on importing products from an excel spreadsheet for more information.
Now it’s important to note that a product can exist in multiple categories and subcategories at once, and you can have as many layers of categories and sub categories and sub-sub-cateogories as you want.
So if you want a product to be in one category for your online shopping that advancpro syncs with, another category for your pricing rules, a third category for reporting purposes, and yet another category for you to put rules against in QuickBooks about which asset account it goes in, you can do each of those with a category you create here – just be careful not to create conflicts with the rules you create using these categories.
Now to add a product to a category or a sub category, just go ahead and click the checkbox to edit that category, and then click the associate product to category button. From here you can search for a product by sku or product name, and then check off the products that you want to add. Once you’re done, go ahead and click the Button to add these items to the category.
Something to note – adding items to a sub category does not necessarily add the items to a main category for reporting purposes and for website navigation purposes. Put product in each of the categories you want.
So Product categories are used all over AdvancePro, you can use them in a customer order, manage inventory, or view all products, to filter a list of your products during a search, you can use them in your web settings for an AdvancePro website to control which items are visible for sale. You can use them in your QuickBooks settings to control the related General Ledger accounts for a particular item, and filter reports such as the inventory report and the sales report by products. In addition, customer groups and categories can be combined to create pricing rules.
Now lets take a look at customer groups, they work very similarly.
Lets go to the customers Dashboard and visit the customer groups button. Here we see a very similar layout to the product categories, and you can add your customers to groups in a very similar way.
Something to note about customer groups is that you have the option here of picking a single customer whose pricing is used for all of the customers in the group. If you update that customer’s pricing, it will get applied to the entire group.
Now once you’ve created groups, as I mentioned you can come to the global pricing manager and match price rules for all customers in a group against all products in a given category, and you can also go to reports and filter certain reports by the customer group, in particular the customer orders report.
This concludes our brief tour of the customer groups and Product Categories features in AdvancePro.