Categories
Open Settings → Categories for the set of categories your team trades. Twelfth seeds these from your product data and lets you give each one a friendly name that people recognise — while the underlying data keys stay fixed, so nothing downstream breaks when you rename.
Where categories come from
Every product carries a raw category value from the system it was imported from — often terse or inconsistent (hair-beauty, Hair & Beauty, HAIRCARE). Twelfth ingests the distinct values it finds and turns each into a managed category with:
- a stable key — a slug derived from the raw value (
Hair & Beauty→hair-beauty) that never changes, so anything referencing the category keeps working; - a friendly label — Title Case by default, and yours to edit;
- one or more aliases — the raw values that map to this category. Every raw value maps to exactly one category, so a label can float above messy data and two raw values can merge into a single row;
- a product count — how many products currently sit under it.
Reconcile new categories
As products change, new raw values appear in the data. They surface at the top of the page as a reconcile queue — “3 new categories in your data” — with the raw value and how many products carry it. For each one you can:
- Add as new — create its own managed category (repeat, or use Add all as new to accept the batch); or
- Map into… — fold it into a category you already have. This is how you merge variants: point
HAIRCAREat the existing Haircare and both raw values now roll up together.
When you map a raw value away and an ingested category is left with no aliases, Twelfth archives it rather than deleting it. It drops out of pickers, but if the same key re-appears in the data later it reactivates the same row instead of forking history.
Rename a category
Under Managed categories, edit any label inline and save. Only the friendly name changes — the key and the raw aliases underneath are untouched, so reports, remits, and recommendations that reference the category keep pointing at the same data.
Use Check for new to re-scan your product data for raw values that have appeared since you last reconciled.
Open a category
Click any row to open the category’s own page. It has two tabs:
- SKUs — every product filed under this category, searchable and sortable, filterable by remit and supplier. A category spans remits, so the remit column is usually the one you want; the list is narrowed to the remits you can read.
- Settings — how demand is measured for these SKUs.
The page’s address carries the category’s id rather than its name, so a link keeps working after a rename.
How demand is measured
Two numbers on the Settings tab decide what the Demand columns mean on every buy, price and transfer review for SKUs in this category:
- Sales window — how far back Units / wk looks. A 28-day window and a 90-day one describe the same SKU very differently, and until this was visible there was no way to tell which you were reading. Hover the column header on any review grid and it names the window in force.
- Cover target — the cover this category aims to hold. Cover is shaded against it: well under target reads as thin, well over as money sitting still. Without a target, a cover figure can only be reported, never judged.
Each number shows where it came from — Workspace default or Set for this category — so an inherited value is never mistaken for a deliberate choice.
Cover is the stock on hand divided by the Units / wk shown beside it, so the two columns can’t contradict each other. Where your source system reports its own days-of-cover figure, it’s kept in the row’s evidence as Days cover (source) — if the two disagree, you can see that rather than having it quietly reconciled.
A SKU with stock and no sales reads No sales, not a very large number; one selling with none on hand reads Out of stock; and a SKU whose sales rate was never reported shows an em dash, because “we don’t know” is a different fact from zero.
Who can edit
- Owners and admins can add, map, merge, and rename categories.
- Everyone else sees the current set read-only.
- The demand settings are managed by Twelfth. They change what every buyer sees, so they’re set by us rather than per workspace. You can always see the numbers in force — if they don’t match how your team reads demand, tell us and we’ll change them.
Categories power people’s remits
The categories you curate here are the same set people are assigned as remits in the People directory. When you edit someone’s directory context, their category remits are picked from this registry — not free text — so ownership converges on one shared, curated set instead of drifting.