Run two venues without switching companies

The second site is where most systems start to leak. Not because anything is hard on its own, but because the software makes you be in one place at a time. You roster the first venue, log out, log into the second, roster that, and then do the pay twice because the two lists never met.

Two different things get tangled together here, and they are worth separating before you set anything up.

• Venues inside one business. Two cafes, one company, one ABN, one payroll. Staff move between them.
• Associated companies. Two companies that you run together, each with its own books and its own payroll, managed by the same people.

Most groups are one or the other. Some are both: three venues, two of them in one company and the third in its own. Everything below works the same way for all three shapes.

One chooser, at the top of the screen

Open Calendar and click the location button at the top. Each company is a heading, with Everyone and then each venue under it. The company you are signed in to is marked Open.

Click a venue, or another company. The roster loads in place. You are not moved: your login, your company and everything else stay where they were, and every shift you add, publish or confirm applies to the location on screen.

That distinction is the whole point. Actually switching company is a hard reload of the app, because the company you are in decides what every screen reads. Doing it in the middle of building a roster costs you the roster you were building. The chooser exists so that the ordinary act of looking at your other site is not a context switch.

The same chooser is on Pay review and on Routes, and it means the same thing in each.

A shift belongs to a place

Once a company has venues, a shift's Venue is set on the shift itself and is required, so a shift is always somewhere. It starts at the venue on screen, or the person's own.

Change it to move one shift to another venue without moving the person. That covers the ordinary Saturday where somebody normally on the main floor covers the second site, and it keeps the hours attributed to the site that had the trade.

Venues live under Admin, then Company, then Locations. Close a venue to stop offering it for new shifts, which keeps every roster that already used it. Give each one a real street address while you are there: the address is what the kiosk measures a check in against, and what routing uses to work out drive times.

Everybody, in one list

Click Admin, then Members, then Whole group. Every person in every company is listed, with a chip for each company they belong to. A dashed chip marked via group means they administer that company through the group rather than as a member of it.

Use All companies to tick the companies or venues you want to see, and Search people to narrow it. On your own company's normal view, All locations filters your members by venue.

Click a person to see their details and each company they belong to. Their contact details, job title and your company's staff fields can be changed from there, and every change is recorded under Change history with who made it and what it became. Their login, photo and active status stay with their own company, because those are theirs rather than yours.

One person, two payrolls

Here is the part that surprises people. A staff member belongs to exactly one company. Somebody who works at two venues in two associated companies is two staff records, one in each, because each company pays them separately and each has to hold its own record of it.

Two venues inside one company is the opposite: one record, one payroll, hours from both sites on the same pay period.

So the question to answer before you set anything up is not how many places you have. It is how many payrolls. Venues where the answer is one payroll; associated companies where the answer is two.

Giving somebody access to both

In any picker that assigns a person, + Add from another company adds somebody who works elsewhere in the group. Search their name, pick the location they will work at here, a team and a role, and send the invite. You are not asked for their name or email, because both come from their own company.

They keep their place in that company and gain one here, so a job, a visit, an item of equipment or a task you give them actually reaches them.

Rostering is the exception, and deliberately so. On Calendar you can give a shift to somebody in the group without adding them at all, because a shift is about their time rather than about your records. Everything else stores who it belongs to, and can only store somebody your company knows.

For access across the whole group, Admin, Members, Roles has a Group roles card. A role created there applies in every company in the group, and seats are one pool across the group, so it costs nothing extra to give somebody both.

Where it stops, on purpose

The chooser shows you another company's day. It does not always let you change it.

• Routes shows another company's runs read only. Switch to that company to plan, send or change anything there.
• Pay review needs you to be an admin of the company whose hours you are reading, not just an admin of your own.
• Whole group on Members is for group admins. An admin of one company sees that the group exists, and not the other companies' people.

None of those are oversights. A group is several businesses that trust each other, not one business with extra addresses, and money and employment records stay inside the company they belong to. What crosses the boundary is the view.

Setting it up

1. Decide venues or companies, by counting payrolls rather than places.
2. For venues: Admin, Company, Locations, and give each a real street address.
3. For a second company: your avatar, then Create associated company. It starts with your calendar setup, so it appears in the location chooser straight away.
4. Set each person's site on their profile, under Where they work. Routes, the kiosk and the staff lists all read it.
5. Appoint your group admins under Admin, Company Links, and give anybody who works across the group a group role rather than two company roles.