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Categorize items

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To maintain an overview of your items and to help you sort and find items, it's useful to organize your items in item categories.

To find items by characteristics, you can assign item attributes to items and also to item categories. For more information, see Work with Item Attributes.

To create an item category

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Item Categories, and then choose the related link.
  2. On the Item Categories page, choose the New action.
  3. On the Item Category Card page, on the General FastTab, fill in the fields as necessary. Hover over a field to read a short description.
  4. On the Attributes FastTab, specify any item attributes for the item category. For more information, see To assign item attributes to item categories.

Note

If the item category has a parent item category, as indicated by the Parent Category field, then any item attributes that are assigned to that parent item category are prefilled on the Attributes FastTab.

Note

Item attributes that you assign to an item category will automatically apply to the item that the item category is assigned to.

If you change your mind about an item category, you can delete it. However, if the category is assigned to an item, you must remove that assignment beforehand.

To assign an item category to an item

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Items, and then choose the related link.
  2. Open the card for the item that you want to assign to an item category.
  3. Choose the lookup button in the Item Category Code field and select an existing item category. Alternatively, choose the New action to first create a new item category as explained in To create an item category.

Categories, attributes, and variants

Categories and attributes are two different ways of grouping inventory items. Item variant is a way to indicate that a specific item is available in different colors or sizes, for example. Depending on how you set up your inventory, you can use categories to group chairs versus desks, and then use attributes to group green items versus blue items, for example. You can then supplement this setup by adding variants to each type of chair and desk. By adding variants, you can run reports such as Item Availability by Variant to identify differences between the blue chairs versus the green chairs, for example.

See also

Work with Item Attributes
Manage Product Variants
Register New Items
Inventory
Work with Business Central

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