Your shop is three records, and only one of them is the shop — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This lesson is for you if you run one shop and something about it behaves differently from the shop down the road — a price, a button, an item that will not come up — and nobody can tell you why. In about eleven minutes you will know which record each of those lives on, which of three applets it is edited in, and how to describe the problem so that whoever fixes it can find it on the first try.

Step 1 — Name the three records your shop is made of

A tenant is the whole BigLedger account. Inside it, a company is a legal entity: the one that files accounts, carries a tax registration, holds a chart of accounts and owns a ledger. A branch is an operating unit of that company — a shop, a warehouse, an online channel. A location is the physical place stock actually sits. Every document, every stock movement and every report line is tagged with all three, and every ledger, report and stock query is filtered by them. They are also the only three things a permission can be narrowed to, so who may see what is drawn along the same lines. They are created in that order — company, then branch, then location — or the branch creates its location as it is saved.

Reference: Organization — Overview

Step 2 — Know what your branch is on a document

After this step you will stop thinking of your branch as who you are and start thinking of it as a column. Every document carries its branch on the header and again on every single line, beside a second column called profit centre. That is deliberate: the branch says where the transaction happened, and the profit centre is a different cut entirely — a department, a business line, a project. Because the branch is on the line and not only on the header, a document can in principle carry lines belonging to more than one branch, and your reports add up by that column rather than by who was logged in. It is why a bill typed by a visiting colleague still counts as yours.

Reference: Organization — Branch, profit centre, and the dimensions a document carries

Step 3 — Learn that your settings are spread across three applets

After this step you will stop hunting in one screen for a setting that was never there. Your branch’s settings live in three different places. The branch record itself, in the Organisation applet, carries the main location, the delivery location, rounding, the default pricing field and a handful of switches. The point of sale keeps seven more tabs of its own per branch — the categories you may sell, the price priority, the settlement defaults, the receipt layout. The Cashbook applet keeps six more. They are all saved against the same branch, and none of them shows you the others. When you report that something is wrong, name the screen you were looking at.

Reference: POS General — Branch Settings — what each tab actually reaches

Step 4 — Recognise a permission pretending to be a setting

After this step you will stop asking for a setting to be changed when the answer is access. A permission in BigLedger can be narrowed to exactly three things, and they are the same three records your shop is made of: a company, a branch, a location. Nothing else. So when a colleague cannot see last month’s bills, cannot open a report, or finds a dropdown empty that is full on your screen, the likeliest cause is that their permission is scoped to a different branch, not that a setting differs between shops. The symptom that gives it away is that the difference follows the person rather than the till.

Reference: Tenant Admin Applet — Related applets

Step 5 — Accept which two things you can never change

After this step you will not waste a morning on either. Your branch code is upper-cased when it is created and then fixed, for everyone, permanently — unlike the company code, which an owner or administrator can still edit. Document numbers and permission-set names already carry it, so it is right that it cannot move. The other is the branch itself on a finalised document: it is written into the header and every line at the moment the document is created, and re-pointing a finished document at a different branch is not something the screen offers. Both of these are worth knowing before you plan a renaming or a reorganisation of shops.

Reference: Organization — Branch — Details, Address and Marketplace

Step 6 — Narrow it to one record before you ask

After this step your question will be answerable. Work in this order. First, is it happening to everyone at this shop or only to one person? If only to one, it is a permission and not a setting. Second, does the same item, price or button behave correctly at another branch? If it does, the difference is on your branch record or in one of the three applets’ branch tabs, and you have narrowed it to one shop. Third, does it involve stock? Then check your location before your branch, because stock lives on the location and almost every stock surprise is a location that is not the one you assume.

Reference: Organization — How you know it worked

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Name the three records your shop is made of"]
  s2["Step 2 — Know what your branch is on a document"]
  s3["Step 3 — Learn that your settings are spread across three applets"]
  s4["Step 4 — Recognise a permission pretending to be a setting"]
  s5["Step 5 — Accept which two things you can never change"]
  s6["Step 6 — Narrow it to one record before you ask"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Why your till cannot find an item that is on your shelf · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation