---
title: Departments
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k82/e-commerce-features/configuring-and-managing-your-store/products.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

The Departments application helps you organize your product management efforts. It allows you to specify [users](https://docs.kentico.com/k82/managing-users.md) responsible for the management of [products](https://docs.kentico.com/k82/e-commerce-features/configuring-and-managing-your-store/products.md) in selected departments of your on-line store. This means you can have different product managers, for example, for the _Books_ department and for the _Electronics_ department.

You can create a single department and place there all your products. If you run a bigger store, your better option is to create multiple departments and have them managed separately by specialized product managers.

> **Info:** Departments are a different feature from product [categories](https://docs.kentico.com/k82/e-commerce-features/configuring-and-managing-your-store/products.md#categories-tab) displayed to the visitors of your website.

When creating a new product or editing an existing one (on the **General** tab), you can specify a department under which this product should be placed. You can do this by using the **Department** drop-down list, or you can add a new department.

![Editing a product - selecting a department](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/k82/departments/editing_product_selecting_department.png "Editing a product - selecting a department")

## Managing departments

You can manage your on-line store departments in the **Store configuration** application on the **Departments** tab (or in **Multistore configuration -> Departments**; [global](https://docs.kentico.com/k82/e-commerce-features/configuring-and-managing-your-store/multisite-store.md) departments only). Here, the system displays a list of all defined departments. You can add new departments by clicking **New department**, and you can modify properties of existing departments after clicking **Edit** () in the **Actions** column. You can also remove departments from your on-line store by clicking **Delete** () next to respective department items.

![Managing departments](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/k82/departments/managing_departments.png "Managing departments")

When editing a department, the system offers the following tabs to specify its properties:

- **General**
- [Default tax classes](#default-tax-classes)
- [Users](#users) [ ](#users)

### General

Here you can edit general properties of the current department.

- **Display name** - specifies the name of the department displayed to users on the live site and in the administration interface.
- **Code name** - specifies the name of the department used by developers in the code.

### Default tax classes

Here you can specify which [taxes](https://docs.kentico.com/k82/e-commerce-features/configuring-and-managing-your-store/tax-classes.md) the system automatically applies to all new products from the currently edited department. To add tax classes, click **Add tax classes** and select appropriate tax classes in the displayed selection dialog. You can remove selected tax classes from the list at any time using the **Remove selected** action. You can also remove all listed items at once by clicking **...** and performing the **Remove all** action.

### Users

Here you can specify which [users](https://docs.kentico.com/k82/managing-users.md) can manage products in the currently edited department. To add a user, click **Add users** and select appropriate users in the displayed selection dialog. You can remove selected users from the list at any time using the **Remove selected** action. You can also remove all listed items at once by clicking **...** and performing the **Remove all** action.