Group products and services into different categories in QuickBooks Online

Learn how to group your products and services in QuickBooks Online.

Get helpful insights into your sales and inventory when you run reports. Group your products and services into categories to keep things organized. We’ll show you how.

In this article, you'll learn how to:

• Create a category
• Categorize the products and services you sell
• Use categories in transactions
• Understand how categories help you with reporting
• Edit or remove a category

Create a category

Use categories to group items of the same type. If you want to be more specific with grouping items, you can also create sub-categories.

1. Go to Sales and select Products & services (Take me there).
2. Select the More ▼ dropdown, then Manage categories.
3. Select New category, then enter the name of the category.
   Note: If you need a create a sub-category, select the Is a sub-category checkbox, then select the main category from the ▼ dropdown.
4. Select Save.

Categorize the products and services you sell

Add a new product or service to a category

You can select a category when you add a new inventory product, service, or non-inventory product.

Add an existing product or service to a category

If you have an uncategorized item, here’s how to add it to a category.

1. Go to Sales and select Products & services (Take me there).
2. Find the product or service you want to categorize.
3. Select Edit from the Action column.
4. Select the Category ▼ dropdown, then select one that fits this item. Or select Add new to create a new one.
5. Select Save and close.

Use categories in transactions

Save time when you create transactions. If you buy and sell many different things, you can use categories to easily find products or services.

Want your categories to show on forms like invoices and sales receipts? Learn how to customize the forms you send to customers.

How categories help you with reporting

When you run sales or inventory reports, products and services are grouped in a way that makes sense to you.

You can expand or collapse each category. This makes it easy to digest what’s in the report. And you can quickly find details of specific items.

This way of grouping also gives you a clearer picture of your sales. It’s easy to see what types of services are popular. And the total for each category helps you know where the bulk of sales comes from.

Edit or remove a category

1. Go to Sales and select Products & services (Take me there).
2. Select the More ▼ dropdown, then Manage categories.
3. Select Edit from the Action column.
4. Make the changes you want and select Save. Or select Remove, then OK.