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Centralized Items & POS Items / Batches
Centralized 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 this week

Note: Centralized Items / POS Items are only used in specific venue setups. In most cases this has been replaced by a new copying feature and aren't used in new venues.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 Centralized Items between your venues. If your venues are using the same POS system, you could potentially have Centralized 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 Centralized Items and Centralized 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+.

Note: This set up is best if there is a designated person managing items across the entire group. You should limit the permissions of other users so they can't edit items.

What are Centralized Items?

With Centralized 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 centralized 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, 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 Centralized POS Items?

With Centralized 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 Centralized POS Items, you need the following:

  • The venues have a Centralized 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 Centralized Item list ensures that the same ingredients are being used across all venues.

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

Despite the recipes being centralized, 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 Centralized List and Additional Venues

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

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 Centralized List

A centralized 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 centralized 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 centralized 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

However, when considering a centralized setup it is best if there is a designated person within the group to manage items. You will also want to limit which users can modify items because changes in one venue will apply to all others. These are things such as the title, category etc.

Other properties such as par levels and costs are unique to each venue and won't apply to the others.

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