About GL Accounts and Product Categories

The Product Categories service is used to group products into categories that may be arranged into a hierarchy so that reporting is as detailed as the organization's business logic requires. The GL accounts associated with product categories do not have any impact on the generation of general ledger (GL) entries in the Orders or Payments services.

For general ledger integration purposes, the product categories serve as templates, or defaults, for all new products defined within them. The GL accounts defined in a given product category automatically flow down into a product that is created within that category.

For example, if a new product record is created with a product category of Meetings, the GL accounts defined for the Meetings product category are copied automatically into the new Products record's GL Account links. For more information on how to link GL accounts to Product Categories records, see Adding GL Accounts to the Product Category.