Plan your Departments

Add a Department | Department Overview

The number of merchandise departments you use will depend on how you plan to evaluate sales performance and on your buying strategy. You can put all merchandise into a single department, but you may want to consider the benefits of setting up a more detailed department structure. Carefully planned departments allow you to view, edit, conduct physical counts, or run reports for selected groups of merchandise.

Consider the following when planning your departments:

- How do you want to break out sales, merchandise, and purchasing reports?

- Do you want to be able to filter your item list for purposes of changing prices, printing price tags, or conducting physical inventory counts by merchandise categories?

- Do you have categories of merchandise that are taxed differently or that you price differently than others?

- Point of Sale can maintain a virtually unlimited number of departments; however too many departments can result in too much detail on reports, which makes it difficult to get useful, consolidated data. It is recommended that you define only as many departments as you need to effectively manage your merchandise purchasing and reporting.

Department Codes

While not required, department codes provide an efficient way to locate a department record and can be useful when you wish the item department to be included on price tags where space is limited. Department codes can be one to three alphanumeric characters of your choosing.

View an example department structure

Related Topics

Edit a department record

Find a department record