Categories and Reporting categories- how specific do you get?So

[Downtown_Dogs]

Hi!  I have a retail store for dogs and are trying to organize my categories to get better reports.   I could used advice on how specific you get, and is the new reporting "parent category" useful.  For example,  one of my categories is "dog food" but I also want to see what my top selling brands of dog food are.  So would I make each dog food brand a "category". And then make "dog food" the parent category?   My main categories now are dog collars, dog toys, dog treats, dog food etc..... but I also want to know what my top selling brands are in each of those categories ( to help with reordering inventory).    Thank you for your feedback! 

Rene' 

Downtown Dogs in Tampa FL

[Candlestore]

@Downtown_Dogs ;

As I see this is your first post let me welcome you to the sellers forum.

How YOU setup categories as Parent and Sub Categories is your choice.  What Information do you need or would require to make your business successful.  Since Square already lets you had a Supplier or Vendor to the Item information and how to sort it by Vendor, I am not sure this is helpful as a category.  But Brands might be if all of a sudden some group deams a certain maker of Pet suppliers is harming animals in testing.  

So lets say you have a Parent category of Dog Collars, Child categories might be Large, Medium and Small dogs, Then under each sub category you may want Material or Color.

With Square you have 1 Main Parent Category but can have unlimited Child (Sub Categories).  Just make sure that if you have a Material such as Chain, its not just chain for the Sub Category but Dog Collar Chain for example so that when Choosing a Parent category for Silver Dog Chain you do not accidentally choose the Parent for Cat Collars.  

This way when you look at your reports you can see maybe there is a Trend that Bright colorered Collars Sell better or worse that other colors of collars so you know which to purchase and stock more of or which ones to discontinue buying in the future.

With Squares Reports Exports you may only See Collar if this is the Reporting Catagory, but in Squares Dashboard you might be able to see the Red, Chrome collars are selling better around Februarty then the rest of the year.  Square when exporting Transaction or Sales reports you would only see The Parent or Reporting Category, and is hard to use excel to filter out the different categories.  This is why Naming the item important.  A Red Collar is not helpful in an Exported report, but a Red, Medium Sized Dog Collar, made of Stainless Steel might help in these type of reports.

What may work for you may not work for someone elses business, so there is no ONE way is the Right way to do this.  The question you need to ask yourself is, in 5 years, what would you like to know about Your Business and can you tell from the Categories and Sub Categories you set up?  My biggest issue was, I could tell what Size or style candle sold but not which Scent was sold the Most or Least.  So when I started with Square, I made sure I could figure that out.  I still have customers come in an say we came here X years ago and there was this scented candle that was my Favorite Scent.  I come to find out that in 5 years I have sold 12 of that scent.  Which is why I discontinued it.