Category Groups organize database items to control the scope of reports. For example, Reporting and Analytics considers the Major menu item groups and Family menu item groups used in many Point-of-Sale applications as category groups and allows users to run reports against one or both groups. Reporting and Analytics does not limit the number of category groups that you can use and allows you to organize the category groups in Category Group Hierarchies so you can run reports against multiple category groups.
For example, one location combines beer, wine, and liquor into the Alcohol group. Another location has a combined group named Beverages but also organizes each beverage by type, so they have a Beer group consisting of domestic, import, and draft. You can use category groups to create a unified set of groups and hierarchies to consolidate information from different systems and produce accurate reports.