Adding a venue to a group — what comes across, what stays separate

When you open a second restaurant under the same brand, you don’t want to retype the menu, rebuild the cashier grid, re-upload every dish photo. The group your venues belong to keeps a shared “library” of all that work, and when you add a new venue the system materializes the library into it. The new venue is fully usable from day one — public menu, cashier grid, ingredient deduction, photos — without anyone touching the kitchen or the till.

What it does

The shared library lives at the group level and holds the master version of everything that’s the same across every location: menu item definitions, prices (as suggestions), recipes and their ingredient lists, the cashier grid that sells those items, the modifiers (sizes, extras, “no onion”), supplier identity and contact details, and every photo of every dish. When you add a new venue, the system walks that library and creates a private copy of each row for the new location.

Crucially, the copies are independent. The new venue can change a price, hide a dish, replace a photo, rename a modifier — none of that touches the original library or any other venue. The opposite is also true: if a sibling venue changes one of its prices, the new venue’s price doesn’t drift. Edits flow only as far as the operator asks them to.

Photos work the same way. Each venue gets its own copies of every dish photo, stored under that venue’s name. If the new venue uploads a better shot of the Pizza Burrata six months later, the change is local — the library and the other venues keep what they had.

The rule

When you add a venue, the new venue inherits everything but owns its copy of everything. The library is the starting point, not a leash.

How to use it

Adding a venue to an existing group is done from the super-admin area, on the group’s detail page. You’ll see two buttons near the member list — Create new member venue and Lift existing venue.

When the venue is brand new

Click Create new member venue. Fill in the name, the URL slug (the short tag that appears in web addresses, like osteria-31 for “Osteria 31”), currency, and timezone. When you confirm, the system creates the venue, links it to the group, and immediately materializes the whole library into it: every category, every menu item, every cashier-grid button, every modifier, every photo, every recipe, every supplier, every role definition.

The materialization takes a few seconds for a typical menu (around 50 items × 3 photo variants ≈ 150 server-side photo copies, plus the database rows). When it finishes, the new venue is ready: log in as the new venue, open the menu, the photos are there. Open the cashier grid, the buttons are there. Ring up a synthetic test sale on the Pizza Burrata, the ingredient deduction works because every link between the cashier item, the recipe, and the inventory item is already wired.

When the venue already exists outside the group

Click Lift existing venue and pick from the dropdown. This is for the case where a venue was created as a one-off (no group) and you now want it to join the family. The lift walks in the other direction: it takes the existing venue’s data and promotes it into the group library, so future new venues can inherit from it. This is the standard step when you set up the very first venue in a chain — you build it as a one-off, get it polished, then lift it into a group so the next location inherits from it.

After a lift, the source venue keeps everything it had. Nothing is moved; everything is copied. The lifted venue continues to work exactly as before — only now it’s also the template for siblings.

If a photo fails to copy

The materialization sometimes hits a transient hiccup on a single photo — the rest of the photos copy through, but one variant of one dish couldn’t reach the photo storage. When this happens, you’ll see a calm amber banner at the top of the member list saying something like “Lifted everything but 1 photo variant failed to copy.” Open the browser developer tools to see which photo, or just click the action again — the import is safe to retry, and the system skips everything that’s already done.

Worked example

Marco runs Sukhumvit 31, his first restaurant. The menu is polished, the cashier grid works, the photos look great. He’s about to open his second location in Phuket, Trattoria Patong, and wants it to start with everything Sukhumvit 31 has.

Marco opens the super-admin area, finds the group Io Osteria — Thailand, and clicks Lift existing venue → picks Sukhumvit 31. The system promotes Sukhumvit’s 47 menu items, 23 recipes, 38 cashier-grid buttons, 4 modifier groups, 12 modifiers, 8 suppliers with contacts, and every photo (47 items × 3 variants = 141 photos) into the group library. Sukhumvit keeps working exactly as before — nothing visible has changed for the floor staff there.

Now Marco clicks Create new member venue and types: name Trattoria Patong, slug patong, currency THB, timezone Asia/Bangkok. The system creates the venue, materializes 47 menu items, 38 cashier buttons, 23 recipes, every supplier, every modifier, and copies every photo into Patong’s own folder. Twelve seconds later, the dialog closes with a green check.

Marco switches to Trattoria Patong. He opens the diner menu — the Pizza Burrata photo is there. He opens the cashier grid — the Pizza Burrata button is there. He rings up a test sale — the system deducts mozzarella, tomato, and basil from Patong’s inventory (which starts empty, so the count goes to negative until the first delivery — exactly the right behaviour, since nothing has physically arrived yet).

A week later Marco notices that the Pizza Burrata photo at Patong looks dull next to the actual dish coming out of Patong’s oven. He uploads a fresh shot. Patong’s library row updates; Sukhumvit’s photo is untouched. The group library still has the original. The next venue Marco opens will inherit the original library photo, not Patong’s local one — that’s deliberate, the library represents the canonical brand shot.

Multi-venue overview — explains the group concept and the difference between a group of independent venues and a chain that shares masters.
Inter-venue stock — once the new venue is up, transfers between sibling venues become available.