Knowledge base — this wiki

The page you’re reading is part of a single, living manual that documents every screen, every button, and every concept in the system. Same content whether you find it through the search bar, through the small ? button in the corner of every admin page, through the sidebar on the public help site, or through a link a colleague sent you. One source, four ways to reach it, five languages it speaks.

This page is for anyone who wants to understand the manual itself — how it’s organised, how to find what you need, how to read it in your own language, and (if you have super-admin rights) how to fix a page that’s wrong.

Why this page exists

A restaurant system you can’t read your way through is a system you’ll only ever know half of. Most people who open the admin app won’t read a training manual cover to cover before they touch the till — they’ll learn the parts they need, in the moments they need them, and skip the rest. The wiki is built for that habit.

Every page describes one feature, one screen, or one concept. Each page is short enough to read in a coffee break and concrete enough to act on the moment you finish it. The pages link to each other.

The wiki is also how the venue, the platform, and the support team stay aligned on what the system actually does. When chef and owner disagree about what a button is for, the wiki settles it. When a new line cook joins, the wiki onboards them. When marketing wants to write a landing page, the wiki is the source. When a future support assistant answers a customer question, it reads the same pages you do.

The rule

Every feature in the system has a page here. If it doesn’t, that’s a bug — tell us.

The wiki is meant to be complete. A button without a page, a screen without an explanation, a concept that lives only in the chef’s head — those are gaps, and we treat them as defects to be fixed, not as features that “everyone already knows”. If you stumble on something undocumented, that’s the signal: the next person who lands on it will be just as lost as you, and the fix is to write the page.

How the wiki is organised

The wiki is split into areas — one per major part of the system. Each area has an overview page and a set of feature pages underneath.

Inventory — the pantry. Items, suppliers, par levels, stock counts, waste.
Prep — what the kitchen makes before service. Prep board, WIP queue, batched recipes.
POS — the till. POS items, prices, modifiers, station routing.
Menu — what the customer reads. Menu items, descriptions, photos, allergens.
Receiving — what arrives at the back door. Delivery notes, reconciliations, price updates.
Roster — who’s working when. Shifts, roles, time-off.
Admin tools — the wiring around the app. AI context, audit log, custom domains, online ordering channels, and the page you’re on right now.
Food and beverage — the deeper knowledge the AI uses when it talks to customers about your wines, your ingredients, and the story of the venue.
Foundations — the conceptual map. Where your information lives, Prices, costs and margins, From idea to till. Read these once and the rest becomes much easier.

The sidebar shows the area you’re currently in and every page in it. Inside a page, links to related features appear near the bottom.

The same page lives at bitethemenu.com/docs/<area>/<page> and at admin.bitethemenu.com/admin/help/<area>/<page> for your team. Content identical, source shared.

Finding what you need

Three ways to land on the right page, depending on what you know.

The search bar. At the top of the wiki — public docs and help drawer — type a word or phrase. The search looks across every page in every language and ranks by match. Typos and partial words are fine.

The contextual ? button. Every page in the admin app has a small ? in the top-right corner. Tap it and a drawer slides in with the help page for the screen you’re on. You don’t have to know what the page is called — the system knows which page maps to which screen. Fastest path when you’re mid-task.

The area sidebar. Inside any wiki page, the sidebar shows the area you’re in and every page in it. This is how you browse when you know roughly where to look.

The three paths converge on the same content. The URL is shareable — copy any wiki link from the drawer, paste it into a colleague’s chat, they land on exactly what you were reading.

Reading in your language

The wiki speaks five languages: English, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Spanish. English is the source — every page is written in English first; the other four are translations.

Which language you see is controlled by your Language Setting — the language picker in the admin topbar. The same picker that changes the rest of the admin also changes the wiki. Pick Italian and every page reads in Italian; pick Thai and the wiki reads in Thai. No separate setting, no per-page toggle.

If a page hasn’t been translated into your chosen language yet, the wiki falls back to English and shows a small EN badge next to the title — this page exists, but only in English so far. Newly written pages live in this state for a few hours.

The English source is the only version humans edit directly. The four translations are produced by an AI model. When the English source moves on, the translations don’t automatically follow — until someone triggers a fresh translation, the other languages show the old English content translated faithfully but out of date.

The wiki warns you. When a translated page is older than the English source, a ⚠️ outdated banner appears at the top: you’re reading a translation of an earlier version. Keep reading — the differences are usually small — or switch your Language Setting to English to see the current version.

How to use it

You don’t read the wiki cover to cover; you ask it the question you have right now.

About to do something for the first time — your first stock count, your first menu publish, your first delivery reconciliation? Open the screen, tap the ?, read the page. Three minutes and you’ve saved yourself from doing the wrong thing.

When something surprises you, the wiki probably explains why. Search for the term, or follow the Related features links. The foundations pages are the deepest reads — ten minutes each, and they explain the shape of the whole system.

Training a new person? Send them a list of wiki URLs and ask them to read in order. The pages are written so someone with no prior context can follow them.

Editing

The rest of this section applies only if you’re signed in as a super admin. The Edit buttons are hidden for everyone else — there’s nothing to break by reading.

The wiki is editable from inside the app. If you spot a typo, a stale paragraph, a missing example, or something documented incorrectly, fix it.

Every page has an Edit here button near the top. Tap it. A markdown editor opens with the source already loaded. The toolbar has the basics — bold, italic, headings, lists, links. When you’re done, tap save.

Saving doesn’t go through a review queue. The edit commits straight to the source repository on the main branch with a meaningful commit message you write before saving. The published wiki redeploys within seconds and the change is live everywhere — public docs, in-app help drawer, per-screen contextual page — at the same time.

If you’d rather work in a real editor with diff view and branches, every page has an Edit on GitHub link at the bottom. Both paths land at the same file.

When you edit the English source, the four translations don’t follow automatically. Use 🌐 Translate to 4 languages below to refresh them.

What happens behind the scenes

The wiki is a folder of plain text files in the source repository — one file per page, organised by area. No separate content management system, no database table — the files in the repository are the only place the content lives.

When you save an edit, it becomes a commit on the main branch with your authorship attached. The deploy pipeline detects the change, rebuilds the published wiki, and pushes it live to the public docs site and the admin help drawer in one go — seconds from save to live everywhere.

The four translations live as separate files next to the English source. When you trigger a re-translation, the AI model reads the current English file, produces four translated versions, and commits them.

The ⚠️ outdated banner is the system comparing fingerprints. Every English file has a content hash; every translation is stamped with the hash it was translated from. If a translation’s stamp doesn’t match the current English hash, the banner appears. The check runs on every page load — no separate index to fall out of sync.

Worked example

The head chef of a small trattoria in Rome — Giulia — is mid-service when a new line cook asks how the prep WIP board works. Two pizzas deep into a ticket, she walks to the kitchen tablet, opens the prep WIP screen, taps the ? in the corner. The help drawer slides in with Prep — work in progress already loaded.

Her Language Setting is Italian, so the page comes up in Italian. A small ⚠️ outdated banner sits under the title — the English source was edited two hours ago to add a paragraph about how the board behaves when a recipe is paused, but the Italian translation hasn’t caught up.

She hands the tablet over. The cook reads the first three paragraphs in Italian, gets the model in his head, then asks about the new paragraph that didn’t translate yet. Giulia switches the Language Setting to English, scrolls down, reads it, explains it to the cook in her own words.

After service she copies the page URL from the drawer and pastes it into the kitchen chat. The link works for the sous chef on the bus home — same URL, no login wall on the public docs.

(Super admin) Triggering a re-translation

After you edit the English source, the four translations are stale. Readers in Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, or Spanish see the old content with a ⚠️ outdated banner. To fix that, trigger a re-translation.

On the page itself there’s a 🌐 Translate to 4 languages button. Tap it. The system reads the current English source and asks the translation AI for fresh versions in all four target languages at once. The model takes 30 to 60 seconds. The four new translations commit, the deploy pipeline rebuilds, and the ⚠️ outdated banners are gone.

Cost is a few cents per page. Don’t re-translate after every typo fix; batch small changes. For a meaningful rewrite, or a new page just published in English, trigger the re-translation immediately.

If you forget, the ⚠️ outdated banner warns readers they’re behind, and another super admin can press the button later. Nothing breaks.

[[wiki-translations]] — the user-facing page about switching languages, the EN fallback badge, and what the ⚠️ outdated banner means in everyday terms.
[[ai-context]] — the audio context the AI uses when it answers customer questions; the wiki is one of its sources of truth.
[[audit-log]] — every wiki edit is also a row in the audit log, so you can see who changed which page and when.