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Supplier product categories

When you add a product to a supplier’s price list, the Add Product form asks you to file it under a category — Wines, Meat & Charcuterie, Dry Goods, and so on. That list is the supplier product categories list, and it is its own thing. This page is about where that list comes from, why it isn’t the same as your inventory categories, and how to add to it when the category you want isn’t there.

What it does

Your venue keeps two category lists, and they do two different jobs. Your inventory categories organise the stock you actually keep and cook from — the pantry, the cellar, the cold store. Your supplier product categories organise what your suppliers sell — their catalogues, their price lists, the things you can order. They look similar, and they often share names (both have a Beverages, both might have a Dairy), but they are kept apart on purpose: a supplier’s catalogue is a different thing from your shelves, and the two grow at different speeds.

The catch that surprises everyone the first time: because the two lists are separate, adding a category to one does nothing for the other. If you create Seafood in your inventory categories, it organises your own fish and shellfish on the shelf — but the supplier Add Product form still won’t offer Seafood, because that form reads the supplier list, which never had it. Nothing is broken; you’re simply looking at the list that doesn’t have the category yet. The fix is to add Seafood to the supplier list too.

This page exists because that moment — “I have this category in one place, why isn’t it in the other?” — is the single most common point of confusion with categories. Once you know there are two lists and which form reads which, it stops being a mystery and becomes a thirty-second job.

The rule

Two lists, two jobs. Inventory categories organise your stock; supplier product categories organise what suppliers sell. The Add Product form reads the supplier list — so a category has to live in the supplier list to show up there, no matter what your inventory list already has.

How to use it

Open it from the sidebar: Settings → Supplier product categories. The page is a simple list — each row is one category, with its emoji, its name, a Food / Beverage / Other type tag, and a preview of any extra fields that category asks suppliers’ products to fill in.

Tap + Add category to create one. The dialog asks for a name (what you want to see in the dropdown — Seafood), a type (Food, Beverage, or Other), and an optional emoji to make it easy to spot. Save, and the category is live immediately — the next time you open Add Product on any supplier, it’s in the dropdown.

Tap Edit on any row to rename it, change its emoji, or move it between Food, Beverage, and Other. Tap Delete to remove one you don’t need — and don’t worry about the products already filed under it: deleting a category never deletes products. Any product that was in the deleted category simply falls back to Uncategorized (Other), and you can re-file it under a different category whenever you like.

You can also jump straight here from where the confusion usually starts: on the supplier Add Product form, just under the category dropdown, there’s a Manage categories → link that opens this page in a new tab — so you can add the missing category and come back to finish adding your product.

Worked example

You’re setting up American-European Food Co. as a supplier and you’re adding their products one by one. You get to a beautiful line of US scallops — Scallop Meat US 10-20 pcs/lb — and you go to file it under Seafood. You open the category dropdown and… there’s no Seafood. There’s Canned & Preserved, Dairy & Cheese, Meat & Charcuterie, Fresh Produce, Wines — but no Seafood. You know you have a Seafood category, because you set one up in your inventory list last month with seventeen items in it.

Here’s what’s happening: the Add Product dropdown reads your supplier category list, and that list came with ten starter categories — Seafood wasn’t one of them. The Seafood you remember lives in your inventory categories, a separate list that organises your own stock. The two don’t share rows, so your inventory Seafood can’t show up here.

So you fix it. Under the dropdown you tap Manage categories →. The supplier product categories page opens in a new tab. You tap + Add category, type Seafood as the name, leave the type on Food, drop a 🐟 in the emoji box, and save. Done — five seconds. You switch back to the Add Product tab, reopen the category dropdown, and there it is: 🐟 Seafood · food. You file your scallops under it and carry on adding the rest of the catalogue. From now on Seafood is a permanent option in the picker for every supplier, not just this one.

  • Suppliers — overview — the supplier price lists these categories organise
  • Inventory categories — the other category list, the one that groups your own stock; understanding the split is the whole point
  • Where your information lives — the five rooms; suppliers and inventory are different rooms, which is why their categories are different lists