A department may want to track expenditures for specific goods or services across all of its projects or programs. For example, a college may want to track the costs for commencement each year.

By establishing a reporting category, the department can gather information on specific expenditures from many accounts and summarize them on one report.

A reporting category code is eight characters long, and all characters must be numeric. The first three digits of a reporting category must be the area code. The next five characters must be numeric, but are chosen by the area manager.