Root and Child Accounts - How They Interact

Within Nōwn it is important to understand how an organizational structure works with your accounts. If you have one location, it's easy, however, when you have multiple locations/franchisees it can be daunting when it comes to figuring out what you can and can't do at certain locations and what changing something at one location will do to the rest. Fortunately, this guide is here to answer those questions! 

Definitions: 

Root Account - A root account would be the 'head office' or 'hq' account. It is usually not a customer facing location and rather is the back office location that allows a Manager or Owner to oversee all stores from one login. 

There are a lot of functionalities that can be completed at the root account that would effect the other stores which we will touch on further in this article. 

Child Account - A child account would be a physical (most likely) staffed location that has it's POS' and additional hardware installed and is Customer facing. A child location has most functionality that would impact its own location, however, any configurations that would effect the business as a whole come from the root account. A Child account would not have access to settings or reports of other child accounts. 

(Diagram illustrates certain information shared from root account to child accounts but not between child accounts)

Region - A region is completely optional, these can be setup from the root account. A region allows you to edit menu items for child locations assigned to that region only rather than changing a product at the root account without a region that would change all child locations. An example of this would be Company A has stores in Canada and USA, they want to add Canadian specific products for the Canadian stores so Company A root account would create two regions 'Canada' and 'USA' and then create a product at Root account but assign to the Canada region only. 

Functions of the Root Account: 

• Can create and edit menus of any store that is associated with the root account 
• Change prices for any of the products for any menu
• Enable/disable an item for mobile order
• View what menu items are available at what locations 
• View Customer's for all locations
• View reports of any location or all locations as a total
• Add staff members to any location 
• Update the Customer display screen (updates for all locations)
• View timecards for staff any any location
• Design e-gift cards for all locations 

Functions of the Child Account:

• Toggling on/off receipt printing for menu items and modifiers is the only menu related access the child account has
• Item availability can be managed from the options button on the main POS screen
• Run transactions 
• View Customers for all locations 
• View reports for that location only
• View receipts for that location only
• View reports for that location only
• Add staff members to that location only
• View timecards for that location only
• Add customer display screen images (will only update that location) 
• Update mobile app images (will only update that location) 
• Update any POS settings for that location 

In short other than the products page that has to be edited from the root account to allow for easy editing across all stores, most other settings and functionality the child location has, it would just be specific to that child location and no others. 

Note: This does not detract from the factor of access, you still need the right level of access to carry out the functions mentioned above. For example just because a child location can view timecards, you would still need to have access of Manager or above to view. For information regarding access please follow Account Set Up - What are log ins and how do they work?