Category GP & brand scorecards.

Most Analytics charts treat your portfolio as one pool of SKUs. The category row splits it the way a buyer actually thinks: how does beer perform against wine, spirits against hemp? Two charts — GP by Category and Brand Mix — answer that, and Brand Scorecards break the same story down to individual brands.

The two category views

The category row sits on the Analytics page directly below the Margin Trends and Gross Profit Trend charts, and it holds two cards:

• GP by Category — a horizontal bar chart, one bar per category, sorted best-earning first. Each bar is the average gross profit per case across every SKU in that category — SKU-weighted, so a ten-SKU beer brand pulls the beer bar harder than a two-SKU one. Hover a bar and the tooltip adds how many brands stand behind the number.
• Brand Mix — a donut showing how your brands distribute across categories, with the total brand count in the center. It counts brands, not SKUs or revenue: a portfolio of six beer brands and one wine brand shows a donut dominated by beer regardless of which earns more.

Read together, they surface concentration risk in one glance: a Brand Mix dominated by one slice next to a GP by Category chart where that same slice ranks last is a portfolio conversation waiting to happen. Both charts respect the brand filter in the toolbar, so you can check whether one flagship is carrying its whole category.

One timing note: unlike the trend charts — which draw on the metric snapshots Alculator records when you save or publish a brand — the category charts compute from your brands and SKUs as they stand right now. Edit an FOB and the category bars reflect it on the next load; no publish needed. How the two data paths differ is covered in Analytics Overview.

Where categories come from

Every grouping traces back to one field: the Category dropdown in the brand editor's header bar. The built-in options are Beer, Wine, Spirits, Hemp / Non-Alc, and Soda / Energy, plus a Custom… option that accepts any label you type — useful for a kombucha or RTD line that deserves its own bar.

Two consequences follow:

• Uncategorized brands group as "Other." If your charts show a large Other bucket, some brands are missing their category. Open each brand and set the field — see Managing Brands.
• The category is independent of the calculator template. Picking the Wine template sets margin defaults; the brand-level Category field is what analytics groups by. They usually match, but only the latter feeds these charts.

Brand Scorecards

Below the SKU Leaderboard, the Brand Scorecards section deals one card per brand, each showing:

• The brand name with its category badge
• Three headline numbers: SKU count, average FOB, and GP per case
• A GP/case sparkline tracing the brand's recorded history (it appears once the brand has at least two recorded data points)
• A publish status — Published, Draft changes, or Never published — and a View Brand link straight into the editor

A sort control orders the deck by GP/case (the default), alphabetically, by most recently updated, or by SKU count. Sorted by GP/case, the scorecards are effectively a ranked answer to "which brand should I work on next?" — and the category badges let you scan whether the laggards cluster in one category. Scorecards are part of the standard Analytics page, not the Trade gate; the rest of the page is toured in Analytics Charts.

Who sees what

Category analytics is the Trade plan's entitlement, and Alculator is upfront about the gate:

• Trade accounts see GP by Category and Brand Mix rendered in full.
• Starter and Pro accounts get the whole Analytics page except the category row. In its place sits a single card labeled Category Analytics with a Trade badge, a blurred stand-in where the bars would be, and a short pitch — "GP and mix by beverage category" — with a See Trade → button. Clicking it opens the upgrade modal comparing plans. That's the product's upsell moment, by design: you see exactly what exists and what unlocking it costs.
• Free accounts don't reach this row at all — the entire Analytics page is locked behind its own blurred preview and upgrade prompt.

Which plan includes which analytics feature — with the actual numbers and prices — is consolidated in Plan Limits; if you're still choosing, start with Which Plan Is Right for You.

When category analytics is worth it

Honestly: not for everyone. A supplier with three beer SKUs will see one bar and one donut slice — the trend charts and scorecards already tell that story. Category analytics earns its keep when the portfolio spans categories:

• Distributors deciding where the next rep hour goes — the GP by Category ranking is the shortest path to "wine is out-earning beer per case in our book"
• Retail buyers balancing shelf space across sets, where mix versus margin is the daily question
• Multi-category brand houses — a hemp line next to a spirits line — that need one screen to compare economics across very different products

The strategic side of that question — how to think about a portfolio rather than a product — is the subject of Portfolio Pricing and SKU Rationalization.