Streamline Product Management With Department Settings

Departments help you organize your product catalog and control how your products behave at checkout, from tax rates and bottle deposits to EBT eligibility, loyalty, and sales reporting. Setting defaults at the department level keeps your catalog consistent and saves time as your store grows.

Navigate to Departments
Create New Parent Department
Department Details
Exclude from Sales Reporting
Tax Rates, Deposits & Containers
Loyalty & Incentives
Sales & Checkout Settings
Edit a Department
Deactivate and Reactivate Departments

Navigate to Departments

Go to Products > Departments in the left-hand navigation. From here you can view all departments, create new ones, or open an existing one to edit.

Create New Parent Department

Parent Departments act as the foundation for groups of related products. This is where you define the core attributes that will “flow down” to everything underneath — saving time and preventing inconsistencies later.

To create a Parent Department:

Navigate to Products and select Departments in the left-hand navigation.
Click Create New in the top right corner.
Select Department.
Enter the Department Name.
Configure your department settings (see sections below).
Review your selections and click Create.

💡 Tip: Use Parent Departments to group related categories and set shared rules, like tax rates or age restrictions, that apply across all sub-departments automatically.

Department Details

Department Name — Required. Use a name that's clear and recognizable to your team.
Parent Department — Optionally nest this department under a parent. Select from your existing departments, or choose None (Make this a parent department) to keep it top-level.
Status — Departments are Active by default. You can deactivate a department once all products have been reassigned or removed. See Deactivate and Reactivate Departments.

Exclude from Sales Reporting

When toggled on, sales from this department are removed from your net sales totals and will not appear in end-of-day (EOD) or other sales reports. They show up instead as Excluded Sales, a separate line item that keeps your reporting complete and reconciled to payments.

This setting applies retroactively. Enabling or disabling it affects all historical reporting, all the way back to when the department was created, not just going forward.

✏️ Note: This is designed for departments like Lottery, Check Cashing, Money Orders, or Western Union — transactions that move money but don't represent true merchandise revenue. If any item belongs to both a sub-department and a parent department, and either one has exclusion turned on, that item will be excluded from sales reports.

⚠️ Caution: Because this change affects all historical reports immediately, enable it intentionally. If you have a department that generates significant revenue and you're not sure whether it should be excluded, check with your Vori contact first.

How Excluded Sales Appear in Reports

When a department is excluded from sales reporting, its transactions don't disappear, they move. Here's where you'll see them across your reporting surfaces.

End of Day Report

In the Sales Summary section, excluded department sales appear as a separate Excluded Sales line item, directly below Net Sales. Your Net Sales figure reflects only the departments that are included. Payments are not affected — Total Payments Expected and Total Payment Collected still account for every transaction that occurred.

Sales Summary Report

In the expanded Sales Summary table, Excluded Sales appears as its own row with a full total. You can expand it to see the detail. Net Sales, Taxes, and payment reconciliation rows are unaffected by exclusion, so your books stay clean.

✏️ Note: A small number of reports are intentionally not affected by department exclusion, including cashier discount usage and tax reports. These are not sales-based reports, so the exclusion setting doesn't apply to them.

Tax Rates, Deposits & Containers

Each field in this section lets you choose between Per product (each product keeps its own setting) or All products (one setting applies across the entire department).

Tax Rates — Select one or more tax rates to apply to all products in this department. Use the search field to find the rate(s) you need.
Bottle Deposits — Assign a deposit fee (for example, CRV) to all products in this department, or leave it to be set per product.
Containers — Set a default container type for the department, or leave it per product.

Loyalty & Incentives

Loyalty Eligible — Options: Set per product, Eligible, Not Eligible. Controls whether products in this department can earn loyalty points.
SNAP Incentive Earnable — Options: Set per product. Controls whether SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) incentive points can be earned on purchases in this department.
SNAP Incentive Redeemable — Options: Set per product. Controls whether earned SNAP incentives can be redeemed on products in this department.
Blackhawk Gift Card — Indicates whether products in this department are associated with Blackhawk gift card transactions.

💡 Tip: Any setting left as Set per product means the value configured on each individual product takes precedence. Department-level settings are defaults, and you can always override them product by product.

Sales & Checkout Settings

Target Margin — Enter a percentage to set a margin target. Switch between Per product and All products to control how it applies.
Age Restriction — Options: Set per product, None, 21 and up, 18 and up, 16 and up. When set at the department level, the POS will prompt for ID verification on all products in this department.
EBT — Options: Set per product, EBT Eligible, Not EBT Eligible. Quickly marks an entire department as eligible or ineligible for Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) payments.
Ecommerce — Options: Set per product, Available Online, Not Available Online. Controls whether products in this department appear in your online storefront.
Variable Sale Price — Options: Set per product, Variable Pricing, No Variable Pricing. Use Variable Pricing for departments like deli or produce where the price is entered at the register.
Tippable — Options: Set per product, Tippable, Not Tippable.
Prompt for Quantity — Options: Set per product, Yes, Prompt, No, Don't Prompt. When enabled, the POS will prompt the cashier to enter a quantity when ringing up items from this department.
Manual Item — Options: Set per product, Yes, No. Manual items don't require a barcode and are entered at the register by description or PLU.
Sync to Deli Scales — Options: Set per product, Yes, Sync, No, Don't Sync. Controls whether products in this department are pushed to connected deli scales.

Edit a Department

In the Departments table, hover over the department name and click Open.
Adjust any settings as needed.
Changes save automatically.

⚠️ Caution: Changes to department settings affect all products in that department immediately. Review your selections carefully, especially for tax rates, EBT eligibility, age restrictions, and the Exclude from Sales Reporting toggle.

Deactivate and Reactivate Departments

Deactivate a department

Go to Catalog > Departments.
Open the department you want to deactivate.
Under Department Details, select the Status field.
Choose Inactive from the dropdown.

✏️ Note: You cannot deactivate a department that still has products attached to it. You'll see a message indicating how many products need to be reassigned or removed first.

Reactivate a department

On the Departments page, use the Status filter and select Inactive.
Open the inactive department.
Under Department Details, select the Status field.
Choose Active from the dropdown.