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Shared Items & POS Items / Batches
Shared Items & POS Items / Batches

How items & POS Items / Batches can be shared between venues that belong to the same hospitality group

Nick Neale avatar
Written by Nick Neale
Updated over a week ago

Note: Shared Items / POS Items are a legacy feature that has been replaced by a new copying feature and aren't used in new venues.

Overview

Introduction

In typical setups, a new venue adds their inventory items, integrates their POS system, and maps their inventory items to their menu items from the POS.

To add another venue, you’d follow the same process.

But what if the venue is part of a franchise/hospitality group and most of the inventory items and menu items are the same between your locations?

In this case, you could benefit from having Shared Items between your venues. If your venues are using the same POS system, you could potentially have Shared POS Items.

This saves time on your initial setup and adding new venues since you'll only need to add the data once for it to populate to other venues.

For example, if you had 10+ venues with a Shared Items and Shared POS Items, you could add new menu items in your POS and map the ingredients in one of your venues, and they would appear in all 10+.

What are Shared Items?

With Shared Items, when an item is added in one venue, it's added to a centralized database the other venues within the group can access.

For the other venues, they will only see that item in their list when it's marked as "active".

An item is set to active by counting it in an inventory, adding it to an invoice, using it in a POS Item or Batch recipe, or it can be done manually. To learn more, see:

This means if you have multiple venues, you only need to do the work of adding your items once. If you add a new venue at a later time, it's just a matter of marking what is needed to active.

Despite having a shared item list, each venue is responsible for its own:

  • Par Levels / Alerts

  • Item Costs

  • Inventory Counts / Areas

  • Invoices

  • Sales Data

Note: Due to the centralized nature of Shared Items, we recommend creating Custom Roles to restrict who can edit item information. If some item details are changed in one venue, it will apply to all others. To learn more, see:

What are Shared POS Items?

With Shared POS Items, when you add the recipe / ingredients to a POS Item, the mapping is applied to every venue within the group. That way you only need to enter your recipes once, and not in each venue.

To have Shared POS Items, you need the following:

  • The venues have a Shared Item List

  • The venues are using the same POS system

  • POS Item codes are the same in each venue

This allows recipes to be copied to each venue without issue. Recipe mapping in WISK is tied to the POS Item Code, and having a Shared Item list ensures that the same ingredients are being used across all venues.

As part of Shared POS Items, Batches are also shared between venues.

Despite the recipes being shared, all sales and costing data is unique to the venue. Based on each venue’s item costs and selling price, it calculates the cost percentage.

Setting up a Shared List and Additional Venues

During your initial conversations with our team, we’ll see if a shared list setup model fits with the needs of your operation. We'll determine if your venue items should be shared, and if your locations use the same POS system, whether the POS menu items should be shared as well.

We’ll create a central (also known as parent) venue that is used to create additional locations (child venues). In this central venue, you won't take any inventories or add invoices. It serves as a central repository for all of your items.

Adding Inventory Items

You can add inventory items to any child venues. Since the item list is shared, those items will appears in all others.

Note: To help keep things organized, as mentioned earlier, only "Active" items in a shared list are visible in a venue. If an item hasn't been inventoried, used as an ingredient in a POS Item or batch, or appeared on an invoice, it's "Inactive" and isn't visible on that venue's item list. However, you can still search for it. To learn more, please see

For adding items, you should follow the best practices for whether it is a WISK Restaurant or WISK Bar venue.

For WISK Restaurant, it will typically be via taking pictures of your invoices or a distributor integration.

For WISK Bar, it will be by scanning the barcodes of your items during your first inventory count. Learn more here:

Adding POS Items

If you're sharing POS Items, for each child venue, you'll complete a separate POS integration with WISK. The central (parent) venue doesn't require an integration because it just serves as a reference for your data.

When the integration is complete in at least one of the child venues and it's pulling its sales data, you can add recipes to your POS Items.

Those POS Items and their mapped recipes then populate in all your venues with shared POS Items.

Note: Remember that the recipe mapping is tied to the POS Item Code. The POS Item Codes need to be the same across venues for the mapping to be Shared.

For each child venue, you'll have all your POS Items mapped, and be able to see the sales data specific to that location if the sales integration is complete.

Managing a Shared List

A shared list among multiple venues reduces the duplication of effort by keeping your items synchronized.

To make sure your inventory item and POS Item data remains of high quality, we recommend custom user roles and permissions to limit which users can edit them. You can learn more here:

Summary

A shared item list is a great way to manage many venues that have a lot of the same items. This is best for clients on Enterprise plans that belong to franchises and/or hospitality groups with multiple identical locations.

If these venues use the same POS system, you can also share the POS Items and their mapping, and any batches / preparations that have been created.

This setup provides the following benefits:

  • Can set up multiple venues in a short amount of time

  • Item data is consistent across all venues. Changes made in one venue are pushed to all other venues in the shared list (name, weights, etc)

  • Par Levels / Alerts and item costs are all at the individual venue level to track operations

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