Items, Categories & Item Groups
Concepts
The next step is entering different product which are sold or used for production. These are modeled as items in the SpicePOS system. Categories and item groups help you to organize large number of products so that,
- POS App users can locate items quickly when they are performing a sale - since POS screen shows a limited number of items at once
- You can yield more from forms and reports available in back-office
- Category wise sales report
- Category wise stock movement report
It’s important to understand how items are displayed in the POS app - order taking screen. Item groups represents the highest hierarchical level. There can be multiple item groups for a SpicePOS system.
Each item in the system can be assigned to a single category and multiple item groups. But a category does not necessarily belong to a single item group. So you can assign a particular item to any number of item groups.
When taking an order using touch (when not using a barcode scanner) the first thing a POS user should do is to select the item group from item groups list. Then in the order taking screen only the Items belonging to the selected Item group will be displayed. And in the category list only the categories having at least a single item belonging to the selected item group will be displayed.
Ex:
Items:
| Item Name | Category |
|---|---|
| Cappuccino | Coffee |
| Espresso | Coffee |
| Milk Tea | Tea |
| Iced Tea | Tea |
| Strawberry Milkshake | Milkshakes |
Item Groups:
| Item Group Name | Items |
|---|---|
| Beverages | Cappuccino, Espresso, Milk Tea, Strawberry Milkshake, Iced Tea |
| Hot Beverages | Cappuccino, Espresso, Milk Tea |
| Cold Beverages | Iced Tea, Strawberry Milkshake |
Modeling your Items List for SpicePOS
Structuring your item list depends on which portion of your items have barcodes and how long is the items list.
All items have Barcodes
If all your items come from suppliers with barcodes or you expect to print barcodes for each and every item you can use a simple structure. You don’t need Item groups and you can define categories only thinking about reporting purposes mentioned before.
Small Items List
If your items list is very small and the number of item icons in the POS app can fit one screen of the POS terminal, then you don’t need item groups or categories to organize items. you can define categories only thinking about reporting purposes mentioned before.
Large Items List, most of them have Barcodes
In this case you don’t need to worry about items with barcodes. But you can organise the other items into a few categories and make those categories appear first in the category dropdown. Then POS users only need to go to those first few categories for touch order taking. Barcode scanner can be used for selecting items with barcodes.
Large Number of Items without Barcodes (or no Item has Barcode)
In such a case you should structure items in POS very carefully. First you should categorize items list. Then item groups should be decided. Ex: A food outlet may have item groups defined as Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Categories may be Rice, Noodles, Pasta, etc.
Apart from this organizing, POS app users can always use the text filter at top for filtering items by item name or SKU. Text search happens for all items in the selected item group or (and) category. If no item group or category is selected, all items are subjected to the search.