Categories

Partner categories are a hierarchical tagging system for organizing your suppliers and clients into logical groups. They make it easier to filter, report on, and manage large numbers of partners — especially as your partner directory grows beyond a handful of records.

How Categories Work

Categories form a tree structure — you create top-level categories and nest subcategories under them. A partner can belong to multiple categories at any level, so categories work like flexible tags rather than rigid folders.

This means a single supplier could be categorized as both “Raw Materials > Metals > Stainless Steel” (what they supply) and “ISO 9001 Certified” (their certification status) — two completely independent classifications applied to the same partner.

Example Category Trees

Here are some common ways to organize categories:

By supply chain role:

Raw Materials
├── Metals
│   ├── Stainless Steel
│   ├── Aluminum
│   └── Copper
├── Plastics
└── Textiles

By business relationship:

By Size
├── Enterprise
├── SMB
└── Micro-enterprise

By Sector
├── Government
├── Private
└── Non-profit

By certification or quality:

Certifications
├── ISO 9001
├── ISO 14001
├── Halal Certified
└── Organic

You can create as many category trees as you need — they are completely flexible.

Managing Categories

1. Go to Business Partners > Categories.
2. Create top-level categories for your broad groupings (e.g., “Raw Materials”, “Certifications”, “By Size”).
3. Add subcategories under each parent for finer classification.
4. Assign categories to partners from the partner detail page.

Category names must be unique within the same level under the same parent. You can have “Services” under “Suppliers” and a separate “Services” under “Clients” — they are distinct because they have different parents.

Categories can be activated or deactivated. Deactivating a category hides it from the selection list but does not remove it from partners that already have it assigned.

Tips

• Keep hierarchies shallow — 2 to 3 levels deep is usually enough. Deep trees become hard to navigate and maintain. “Raw Materials > Metals > Stainless Steel” is fine. “Suppliers > Active > Regional > North > Metals > Ferrous > Stainless Steel” is too deep.
• Cross-cutting categories work best at the top level — classifications like certifications, regions, or business sizes apply across all partner types. Keep them as their own top-level trees rather than nesting them under “Suppliers” or “Clients”.
• Partners can belong to categories at any level — they are not restricted to leaf nodes. A partner that supplies many types of metal can be assigned to “Metals” directly, without picking a specific sub-type.
• Plan your categories before creating partners — setting up a good category structure first means you can classify partners as you create them, rather than going back to tag hundreds of records later.
• Use categories for access control — partner categories can be referenced in row access rules. For example, you could restrict a user to only see partners in the “Government” category.