Organize services into categories
By the end of this article you will have a set of categories that group your catalog the way your business thinks about it, and you will know how tags differ from them.
A category is a section — Wash, Interior, Protection. A tag is a label you can put on anything, in any number — seasonal, fleet-only, needs two people. Both live on the Categories & Tags page under Catalog.
Add a category
- Open Catalog → Categories and click Add Category.
- Type the Category Name. The field is bilingual: click Show Spanish to type the Spanish name yourself, or Auto-translate to have it drafted. A technician whose phone is in Spanish sees the Spanish name, so check the draft.
- Add a Description if the name alone is not enough for your team.
- Set the Sort Order. Lower numbers come first; this is the order the technician’s phone groups your services in when they build a job, category by category.
- Under Applies To, tick where the category may be used: Services, Products, Equipment. A category for Chemicals need not be offered when someone is filing a service.
- Click Create.
The category is now offered in the Category field of the service, inventory and gear forms.
Use a category on an item
Open the item and pick from the Category list. The field says Select or type category because you can also type a name that is not on the list — the item keeps that text as its category, but nothing is created on this page. Add the category here first if you want it offered to everyone.
The item stores the name as text, in the language you were working in when you picked it. The phone matches that text against both names of the category, so a technician still sees it in their own language; the web shows the text as stored.
Search on this page matches either language, so a category you named in Spanish is found from the English side.
Tags
Switch to the Tags tab and click Add Tag. A tag has a Tag Name and an optional Color; the Preview shows how it will look. Tags can also be created on the fly from the Tags field of any item form.
Deleting a tag removes it from every item that carried it, and cannot be undone — the confirmation says so.
Deactivate a category
Click the deactivate icon on the row and confirm. Items already filed under the category keep it; it simply stops being offered for new ones. To see the retired ones, switch on Show inactive — they carry an Inactive chip, and the Activate icon on the row brings one back.
Good to know
- A category is a name, not a link. Renaming one does not rename the items that already carry the old text; edit those items too.
- Categories only order the phone. On the web and on your online booking page, services follow their own Sort Order and are not grouped by category; see Create a service and price it by vehicle type.
- Who can do this: owners, admins and managers edit categories and tags; technicians, accounting and viewers see them read-only.