Sales by Category shows what each product category sold over a date range: quantity, revenue, cost, profit, margin, and its share of your sales. Use it to see which parts of the store make you money, and to answer questions like "how many speakers did we sell" without your complete kits mixed into the number.

Go to Reports > Accounting > Sales by Category and pick a date range at the top. It is a financial report: owners and store managers see it by default, and an owner can grant the Financial reports permission to anyone else under Managers > Permissions.

How subcategories show: a subcategory's sales roll up into its top-level category. The top-level row carries the total, and each subcategory is listed beneath it, indented. Products filed directly on a parent that also has subcategories show beneath it as "Filed directly under" that parent.

What the numbers mean

  • Revenue is after each invoice's discount, so the rows add up to what customers were charged before tax. Refunds subtract.
  • Cost is the cost recorded on each line when it sold, so a later cost change does not rewrite history. A line sold before costs were recorded on it uses the product's current cost.
  • The report counts posted, paid, and partially paid invoices by the day they were posted, the same as Daily Sales.

Rows outside your categories: so nothing drops out of the total, the bottom of the table has rows for Products with no category, Items not in your catalog (custom items typed onto an invoice), Labor not in your catalog (labor typed in with + Labor), and Misc charges. Misc charges have no cost, so no margin is shown for them.

Filters

  • Types: limit the report to Retail, Dealer, Repair, Warranty, or Refund documents.
  • Category: tick one or more categories to see only those. Picking a parent includes its subcategories. "No category" shows products with no category plus anything not in your catalog. Nothing ticked means everything.
  • Tags: tick a tag to count only products carrying it. Ticking several narrows further, because a product has to carry every tag you tick. For example, tick Speakers in Category and 6.5" in Tags.
  • Show beneath each category: Subcategories (the default) or Tags. On Tags, each category lists its sales by tag instead, for example Mono, 4 Channel and Marine under Amplifiers, with untagged products last as No tags. A product with several tags counts under each one, so the tag rows overlap and do not add up to the category; the report says so above the table. This choice appears once your shop has tags.

Misc charges are left out whenever a category or tag is ticked, since they belong to no category.

Printing, exporting, favorites, and the End of Day package all keep your filters, and the printout names the categories and tags you picked under its title so a filtered page cannot pass for the whole store.

Example: to see speaker sales without your powersports and motorcycle complete kits in them, file those kits under a Complete Systems category, then tick Speakers in the Category filter. To see only the kits, tick Complete Systems and add the Powersports or Motorcycle tag.

Related: Profit Margins shows revenue and cost per product, Inventory Valuation shows what you have on the shelf per category, and Products vs Labor per Salesperson splits each rep's sales into product and labor.