Admin is the organization's own view across the businesses you run: the organization and its brands, every location, the location groups at each, who has a login where, the parts of the app each business uses, the tools each has linked, and what the organization pays. It sits just above Settings in the Apps menu, for an owner, or an admin with the business settings switch. What is one business's own, such as its tax, its look and its messages, stays in that business's Settings.
Each change you make here names the business it is for and is made as you are at that business, with its own switches and its own activity log. Switching between businesses is still done from the business menu at the top.
Organization
- The organization's name (Rename it, as an owner).
- Each business you can open, with its kind (a service business, or A brand kept as a business of its own), its brand, its locations and its logins. A business where you are not an owner or admin is listed, and its owner runs it.
- Modules on a row opens that business's modules, picked; Open drops into the business itself, the way the business menu at the top does.
- Add a business (an owner): its name, what kind of business it is, and its brand. It gets its own books, customers, team and stock, with you as its owner, and starts with what its kind of business always has; switch on the rest under Modules.
- Add a brand (an owner): a product line kept as a business of its own, so one day it can be sold or spun off without the salon. Give it its name and say what it is set up as (a product brand, or manufacturing and distribution). It gets its own books, products, stock and wholesale accounts, with you as its owner, and the Brand module connected: its marketplace listing and wholesale on, with manufacturing and retail waiting under Modules. A trade name already in the list below can be picked instead of a new name. Add a second brand for a second line: each is separate.
- Every location goes to the Locations tab.
- Clients Across Your Businesses (an owner): every location of a business already shares its clients; across the organization's businesses the records stay apart until the switch A client known at one of your businesses is found at the others is on. Then a search at any of them finds the people the others know, Bring over makes that business's own record from what the other knows, and a note marked Every business you run reads on both records. See Clients.
Brands
A brand is a name businesses and locations trade under: a salon group's name on the door. A product line is a brand kept as a business of its own, with its records; the list says which is which. Type a name and choose Add a trade name, then give it to a business in the table above, or to one location under Locations. Give it a business of its own turns a trade name into a brand business under that name. Rename or Remove it; removing leaves its businesses and locations as they are, without it, and a brand that is a business of its own keeps that business and everything in it. A brand here is not the brand on a product you carry.
Buying from your brands
A business in the organization can be a brand's wholesale client without typing anything twice. The card lists each brand that is a business of its own and the other businesses you run; Make it a wholesale client gives the brand an approved wholesale account for that business, with its name, its main location's address, phone and email, on the brand's usual terms for approved accounts. Each keeps its own books, and the account is the link between them. Its prices, terms and the people who order for it are changed on the account under the brand's Products, Wholesale; the people who order sign in to the brand's store with their own email. Wholesale has to be on for the brand (under Modules) first.
Locations
Every location of the businesses you run, a card a business:
- Choose Add a location, or open one from its row.
- Give it a Name and say What it is: a store or salon, an office, a warehouse, a 3PL, a plant, or mobile (the work goes to the client). Only a store and a mobile location can take bookings: switch Take online bookings here on or off.
- Under Where It Is: the address, phone and email, and its Time zone when it is not the business's.
- Under Hours: tick each day it opens and pick when it opens and closes. The hours are kept with the location and given to programs through the API; the calendar and the booking page still follow each person's own hours.
- Under Who and What: who it is Run by (someone on that business's team) and its Brand, when it trades under another than its business's.
- Save.
Below the form:
- Make it the main one: the app opens here, and new location groups go here. The main location is the first in the business's own order.
- Move it to another business: to move a location to another business of the organization, pick the business and confirm. It closes where it was, with its visits, sales and books kept where they happened, and opens at the other business with its address, kind, hours, tax rates and brand. It is refused while visits are still booked there, its cash drawer is open, or stock is kept there in the first business's books (sell the stock to the other business, or move it to another location, first), and for a business's last open location. Moving one takes a login that runs both businesses.
- Close it: its history and reports stay. Open it again brings it back, except for a location that was moved, which is open at its new business.
Show closed lists the closed ones too, with where a moved one went.
Location groups
Where stock is kept at each location: a salon's back room, a warehouse building, a 3PL's. Stock sits in a bin, in a stock place, in a location group, at a location. For each business that keeps stock, add a group with its name and the location it is at, rename it, move it to another location, or delete one that has no places in it. The groups at 3PLs and makers are folded away until you choose to show them. The shelves and places inside each group are set up in Inventory, under Setup; with advanced inventory, each group also says what kind of place it is.
People
Everyone with a login at the businesses you own, a person a row and a business a column (on a tablet or a phone, one business at a time, picked at the top):
- Change someone's place at a business (owner, admin, manager, front desk, staff, bookkeeper, designer), or take them off it.
- Give a login here gives someone already at one of the businesses a login at another, without an invitation.
- Invite Someone new by email, at a business, with their place. Send them the link it makes; it is good for 14 days and only for that address. Take it back cancels an invitation not yet used.
Each cell says where they work and the locations they run. What each place may do, switch by switch, stays in each business's Settings, Team.
Modules
The parts of the app each business uses, a part a row and a business a column (on a tablet or a phone, one business at a time). Each business's kind suggests a set to start with, and any part can be switched on for any business: Not suggested for its kind marks a part its kind does not usually use, still a switch like the rest. The kind is picked at the top of each column, by group: Beauty, Wellness and Fitness are presets that switch on what that kind uses, give the booking page its words, set the register's tip tiles and, when you say so, add a starter menu, rooms and forms as ordinary records (anything already there by the same name is left alone); Other kinds set the switches alone. Within that, each part is a switch: what is off disappears from that business's screens and nothing in it is lost. Change a business's kind with the list under its name; what it already uses stays on.
Under a part, the features inside it are switches of their own, set in from the edge, each with a sentence of what it does:
- Under Inventory: Advanced inventory, Manufacturing and Retail. Manufacturing and retail need advanced inventory, and switch it on when they are switched on. They are the same switches as under Inventory, Setup.
- Under Add-On Modules, the Brand module: connect it to a brand business (a kind of business with wholesale is offered it). Connected, the business has its Marketplace listing (My brand) and Wholesale on; Manufacturing and Retail wait to be switched on as the brand needs them. Taken off, the listing, manufacturing and retail go off and the business is shown none of it; wholesale stays as it is. Nothing is lost either way: connect it again and the listings, accounts and runs are back.
A feature of a module that is off says what to switch on first. Start a business simple and connect what it needs: it never has to start over.
Tools
What each business has linked: email marketing, Google reviews, Shopify, ADP, webhooks, API keys and, with Shipping, its carriers. Each says whether it is connected and what it does. Keys are entered only in each business's own Settings, Connections: Connect more in Settings, Connections for the business that is open, or Open another business's connections, which opens that business.
With the pay-as-you-go tools on, Pay-as-you-go shows what they did for the business that is open: every call with its receipt, each job's receipt, the rules a call waits for a sign-off past, and the catalog. See Pay-as-you-go tools and the wallet.
Usage & Capacity
What each business holds and the work it does, part of the app by part: the database and its files apart, what is growing and what drives it, the work of each day, and how each figure is measured, so you can tell when a larger plan, or a change in how a part is used, would make sense. It reads counts and sizes, never a record. See Usage and capacity.
Compliance
The business's own side of SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA: the controls map with where each stands, the session policy and the second factor, the health-information switch, the quarterly access review, the incident log and retention with the legal hold. See Compliance.
Billing
What your organization pays BookNovi: your plan or your free trial with its days left, the logins and add-ons in use against what the plan includes, this month's emails and texts, the card on file and your invoices. An owner chooses the plan, by the month or the year, and pays on the card processor's own page. See Plans and billing.
Below it, a prepaid wallet for each business you run that has the pay-as-you-go tools on, in US dollars: what is in it, what running calls hold and what is left to spend, Add money, Pause spending, and its money in and out, each charge opening its call's receipt.
Platform
The platform's own admins, the people the server names as its admins, see one more tab, Platform: the plans and sign-up codes, the server's secret, every business's backups and restore requests (see Backups, history and getting things back), and the platform's background work.
Background Work lists each kind of work on the job queue: how many are due, how long the oldest has waited, how many run now, how many stopped after their last try, the last run with what came of it, and today's runs, failures and time. A job that fails is tried again later; one that fails every try stops, and is listed under Stopped After Their Last Try with its business and why, to Start again or Let go. The pill beside the title says whether something calls the worker every minute or the queue runs only with the daily clock, and a warning says when nothing calls the long worker every hour, which makes each business's daily copy at the hour it chose. The figures give when the daily clock last began and the long worker was last called, and name the clock's passes that failed in its last run or waited for its next. What is late is said at the top in red and emailed to the platform's admins once a day. docs/RECOVERY.md, "The job queue", says how to call the workers.
Best practices
- Say what kind of place each location is before anything else: a warehouse or a 3PL is never offered on the booking page.
- Set each location's hours and who runs it; programs and the API read them, and so do the people who call you.
- Use a trade name for the name on the door, and a brand business for a product line you might one day sell on its own: its own books, products, stock and wholesale accounts.
- Make your salon the brand's wholesale client from Buying from your brands rather than typing its account by hand; the two stay linked.
- Give a login at another business from People rather than inviting the same person twice.
- Switch modules off rather than leaving parts nobody uses: the screens stay simple, and nothing is lost.