How do you customize categories in the "Chart of Accounts" ? We need different categories.

Hello information,

We won't be able to customize the categories in the Chart of Accounts. I'd recommend seeking professional advice from your accountant. They can give you ideas on how to manage the existing categories to suit your business needs.

You can also share your idea to our Product Development Team. Feel free to click the Gear icon in the upper-right corner and select Feedback.

Let us know if you need anything else.

Category is account, why intuit called it something else is unknown

you can rename accounts, except for some default accounts, and you can create accounts, and sub accounts as needed.

 The best thing IMO is to get the tax form your company will file and create accounts to match the tax form entries.  Then for each area you can create sub accounts for detail.  When you have sub accounts, do not post to the parent, it acts as a summing account showing the total of all sub accounts

QB works on items, items are what you do or sell, and the item determines which account is posted to when you select the account on the item screen (products & services in QBO)