Sales Reporting Using Categories
Overview
Adding categories to products or contacts enables you to group like products or contacts for reporting or operational use. This enables you to do detailed reporting. For example, you may want to see whether you make more profit selling chardonnay to restaurants or in direct sales . . .
Or maybe you want to track at annual export revenue growth by customer region?
These types of questions can be answered by adding categories to your customers and products and using these to create customised reports.
In this document:
Reporting with Categories
The Sales By Period Report is one of Vinsight’s most flexible and customisable reports. Provided you have added the categories you are interested in tracking, you can adjust the parameters to come up with whatever combination of results you are interested in.
We have set out below a few examples of the types of reports that you can generate and the parameters you might use to do this:
- Example 1 – Which Wine Blend and Sales Channel is the Most Profitable
- Example 2 – Track Annual Export Revenue By Customer Region
- Example 3 – Annual Sales By Wine Type
Example 1 – Which Wine Blend and Sales Channel is the Most Profitable
This report shows us that, while we make a better profit margin on our direct sales of chardonnay to consumers, we sell significantly more chardonnay to distributors and restaurants so these channels contribute a greater monetary value to our profit.
In the above example, we added a product category of ‘blend’ which takes the values ‘chardonnay’, ‘pinot gris’, ‘syrah’ etc to relevant stock items. We also added a customer category of ‘channel’ which takes the values ‘direct’, distributor’, ‘export’ etc to each customer. Information regarding how to go about doing this is set out in ‘Adding Categories to Products‘ and ‘Adding Categories to Contacts‘ below.
Example 2 – Track Annual Export Revenue By Customer Region
This report shows us that while sales to Europe are declining, and sales to North America are showing a steady growth, sales to Asia are increasing rapidly and currently represent our biggest export market.
In the above example, we added customer categories, ‘blend’ and ‘region’ to each customer Information regarding how to go about doing this is set out in ‘Adding Categories to Products‘ and ‘Adding Categories to Contacts‘ below.
Example 3 – Annual Sales By Wine Type
In the above example, we have added customer categories, ‘Wine Type’ (just another name for ‘Blend’ above) to relevant stock items. Information regarding how to go about doing this is set out in ‘Adding Categories to Products‘ and ‘Adding Categories to Contacts‘ below.
Adding Categories to Contacts
The best type of categories are the ones where you have a label and a choice of values rather than standalone single names. A silly example, rather than having a category “chocolate ice cream”, you should have category called “flavour” with the value “chocolate” and a category called “food type” with the value “ice cream”.
To add contact categories to customers, firstly set these up in Settings. Simply go to Settings> under Contacts > Contact Categories.
The idea is to split up these categories as much as possible to later make reporting flexible. For example you can start with a high legal category “Channel” this is your top level sales channel and you can break it down further through “sub-channel”. Others like “venue-type” and “buying-group” (if relevant) can also be separated.
Whilst it is completely up to you how these are configured, here are some examples of what we think work best:
Once these are setup here, they can be added to customers by going through Contacts> Customers> Edit.
If you are adding categories to multiple customers we recommend using our spreadsheet import to do this in bulk. To generate the correct columns in the spreadsheet pick 3-5 customers and edit these customers in the user interface, before exporting them to a spreadsheet. For example, if you have 4 different categories you want the option to select from, make sure you have added those across your example customers. This will ensure when you download a spreadsheet you will have a) the right column available and b) a range of the right values that you can then copy and paste down the spreadsheet.
Using the same categories as above see our example customer:
Note that the drop-down options to choose from are those that were typed in Settings. Also not all customers need all category types eg if they are not part of a buying group, then you don’t need a value for buying-group.
Once you have saved your example customers you can go back to Customers>Select all> Download Csv or Excel:
In the spreadsheet you can delete all columns you don’t need except the first two (contact code and contact num), to end up with this:
Some examples of product categories you could add are:
Once contacts have been updated with the correct categories you can import them back to Vinsight using the Import function:
Adding Categories to Products
Categories are added to Products the exact same way as contacts, except they are initially setup in Settings> Under Count> Product Categories
We have provided some examples of how you can set up these product categories:
| Code | Values |
| product-type | beer, wine, spirits, cider |
| blend | chardonnay, pinot-noir, pinot-gris, bordeaux |
| spirit-type | gin, whisky, vodka, liqueur |
| beer-type | ale, lager, IPA |
| brand | plaintree, running-river |
| product-variant | boysenberry, traditional |
| vintage | 2026,2027… |
| release-status | on-hold, available, limited, archived |
| label | reserve, single-vineyard |