One Business, Several Departments — Setup Guide
Use this for any client that is one company with several departments, such as a bar, a butchery and a night club under one roof. Each department gets its own sales, cost of sales, purchases and stock, and the departments still add up exactly to the business as a whole. Nothing here changes how a single-department business works.
Before you start: four decisions
| Decision | Option A | Option B |
|---|---|---|
| Fiscal devices | One device shared by every till: one fiscal day and one Z-report for the premises | One device per department: a separate Z-report for each |
| Stock | Shared: one shelf for the whole premises | Separate: a store room per department (Bar Store, Club Store, Cold Room) |
| Tills | One till per department: every sale is tagged by its till | A shared counter: sales are tagged by each item’s department |
| Weighed goods | Weight typed in, or read from a scale connected to the till | Scale-printed labels with the price or weight in the barcode |
Have ready: the list of departments; the item list per department (name, price, HS code, whether stock is tracked); opening stock per item, and per store room if stock is separate; one cash account per till if each department cashes up separately.
Setup, step by step
- Register the fiscal device(s) in Devices & Fiscal Days. Once a production device is live, the stock branch is that device’s branch.
- Create the departments: Billing Studio → Departments → Add department.
- Switch on per-sale costing: Departments → Set-up → Costing → Switch On From Today. Do this before any trading: without it, cost of sales is one figure for the whole business and cannot be split by department.
- Add store rooms, only if stock is separate: Departments → Set-up → Store rooms. Names must be unique and cannot be a branch name, “Main Branch” or the business name.
- Create the tills: POS → Tills, one per counter, each with its own cash account if departments cash up separately. If you made store rooms, set each till’s Sells Out Of to its room.
- Assign each till to its department: Departments → Set-up → Tills.
- Add the items in Items & HS Codes, then assign each to its department in Departments → Set-up → Items. A night club entry fee is a service item with HS code 99001000.
- Enter opening stock per item, into the right store room if stock is separate.
- Set up weighed goods in POS settings if using a scale or scale labels; the label layout depends on the scale brand.
Day to day
- Selling: each till’s sales and refunds go to its department and come off its store room, if it has one.
- Receiving stock: record the supplier bill, tag it to its department, and receive the goods into the right store room.
- Moving stock between rooms: use a stock transfer in Stock Management.
- Refunds and credit notes follow the original invoice’s department; nothing to tag.
- Expenses: tag each to its department; shared costs such as rent can stay untagged.
- Stock takes: count one store room at a time. Only that room’s sales pause while the count is open.
- Cash-ups: each till cashes up into its own cash account.
How a sale finds its department
- A department someone set by hand is kept.
- A credit or debit note follows the invoice it corrects.
- A sale at a till assigned to a department goes there, whatever it sold.
- An invoice whose items all belong to one department goes there.
- A mixed basket nobody tagged is shared by line in the report: each line’s sales and cost go to its item’s department.
Reports
Profit & Loss by Department (Billing Studio → Departments) shows revenue, cost of sales, gross profit, expenses and net profit per department; the departments plus Not allocated always add up to the business, to the cent. Not allocated holds what belongs to no department: untagged documents, lines of unassigned items, stock losses, depreciation, journals and bank movements. A large figure there usually means tills or items still need assigning. Stock on Hand, each till’s cash-up and the Z-report work as usual.
Go-live checklist
- Production fiscal device registered and its first day opens
- Departments created, and per-sale costing on (Set-up says “Each sale is costed”)
- Store rooms created, if stock is separate
- Tills created, each with its cash account and store room, and assigned to a department
- Every item assigned to a department, and opening stock entered per store room
- Scale or scale labels tested on one weighed item
- One test sale per till: check its department in the report and its stock in the right room