What’s the difference between product and reporting categories?

Question

How do product categories differ from reporting categories?

Solution

Product categories and reporting categories have different purposes in ROLLER.

• Product categories can help you organize and manage your products, including finding bookings or sales related to similar products.
• Reporting categories enable you to categorize your products with General Ledger (GL) codes for accounting purposes. This can include grouping reporting data by GL code to make it easier to analyze financial information.

Product categories

Product categories are used to group similar products together. For example, you may want to group products by activity or attraction type, groups, parties or food and beverage. They allow you to:

• Set up, manage and group your products by category in the progressive checkout
• Find what you're looking for when creating new bookings in Venue Manager
• Search and filter bookings by product categories using the daily capacity, calendar and runsheet
• Filter report views by product categories

To set up your product categories, from Venue Manager, go to Products > Categories.

Reporting categories

Reporting categories are useful if you want to group reporting data for multiple products under a particular reporting category and GL code. Each reporting category is assigned to a GL code and helps with grouping products together for ease of reconciliation when reporting.

For example, you may want to create reporting categories using GL codes for parties, season passes, weekday admissions, weekend admissions, food and beverage or merchandise.

They allow you to:

• Group transactions by GL codes when using key reports in ROLLER.
• Map transactions in ROLLER with other accounting systems you use by creating reporting categories with the same GL codes in ROLLER.

Reporting categories appear in the following key reports in ROLLER. 

• Detailed Product Sales report
• Revenue Recognition report
• Trial Balance
• Ledger Summary report 
• Xero export

To create your reporting categories, from Venue Manager, go to Reports > Reporting categories.

Learn more

• Create and manage your product categories
  • View daily capacity and redemptions
  • View bookings using calendar view
  • How to use the runsheet
  • Customize the reporting grid
• Create and manage your reporting categories
  • Reporting categories video on Academy
  • ROLLER for bookkeepers