Categories help you divide companies and contacts into different groups. By adding a set of new categories, say "New prospects" or "VIP customers" you can easily find them by filters in different parts of the platform. A company or contact can belong to multiple categories.

Roles & company categories

When editing categories you'll find a setting to add roles to the categories, if having multiple teams working in the same account this is a great way to simplify their way of working. Let's say your account has two different roles, and let's call them Team New York and Team Chicago.

The users in Team New York wants to categorize companies one way and Team Chicago another way.
When adding the role of Team New York to a company category the users in this team has the option of adding this category to companies and filter lists with it. 
The users in Team Chicago will then be able to see that a company has this category, but can't add it themselves to companies. Team Chicago can only set and filter on the categories that their role has access to.

Categories simplify the workflow for the users in these roles as they don't have to see the other role's categories when for example filtering.

Extra categories

Let's say your account is using the standard categories for determining the status of the company from 1 to 10. If you'd like more ways to categorize your companies, for example, which products they've bought, create an extra company category and name it something like "Bought products" and add your product names as options inside of that category. You can now filter on both your standard company categories as well as your extra ones in the list of the platform and in the advanced search.

Company categories is found in Settings under the CRM tab. You need administrator access to edit this.