Branches
Running from more than one place — two shops, a shop and a warehouse, branches in three towns — means knowing which branch earned what, and which one is short.
A branch is one business with several places, not several businesses. One customer list, one product catalogue, one set of books. Each branch keeps its own stock, tills, staff and profit & loss inside that.
You do not have to do anything
If you run one place, nothing here applies and nothing has changed. Branches appear only once you open a second one. Your existing shop keeps its stock, its tills and its history exactly where they are.
Branches vs money locations
Easy to confuse, worth keeping straight:
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| Branch | A place where business happens — a shop, a warehouse |
| Money location | A place where money sits — a till, a safe, a MoMo wallet, a bank account |
One branch usually holds several money locations: a till at the counter, a float in the safe, a store room. A money location can also belong to no branch at all — see Accounts that belong to nobody.
Your main branch
Every business has one main branch. If you have never thought about branches, it is named after your business and holds everything you already have.
You can rename it to something truer — Kabalagala, Main Shop, Head Office — under Branches.
The main branch is what everything defaults to, so it cannot be closed. If you want to retire it, make another branch the main one first.
1. Open a branch
Select Branches in the sidebar, then Open a branch.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Name | Ntinda Shop |
| Short code | NTD — appears on receipts and reports where the full name will not fit. Type your own, select Generate, or leave it blank and we work one out |
| Phone, Address | Optional |
Generate suggests initials — Tororo Branch becomes TB — and skips anything another branch already uses, so TB and TB2 never both mean Tororo. It is the same code you would get by leaving the field empty.
The moment you have two branches, branch pickers and columns appear across the app. Until then they stay hidden.
2. Attach a till
A branch with no till cannot sell or hold stock. This is the gap between "I opened a branch" and "my branch can trade", and it catches people out.
On the branch's card, select Tills. You will see every account in the business and where it currently sits. Select Attach here on the ones that belong to this branch.
A new branch starts with nothing
Opening a branch does not create a till for it. Either attach an existing one or create a new money location under Balances and attach that. The Branches page warns you while a branch has none.
Accounts that belong to nobody
Leave an account unattached when it belongs to the company rather than to any one shop — the business bank account is the usual case.
This matters more than it sounds. Forcing the company bank account into a branch makes that branch's profit & loss wrong the first time you pay a supplier from it.
3. Assign staff — and what that actually does
On the branch card, select Staff.
The default is permissive, which surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly:
Until somebody is assigned to a branch, they can see every branch. Assigning them to one is the act that restricts them.
So adding your Ntinda manager to Ntinda does not grant them access — it takes away everything else. Remove their last branch assignment and they can see the whole business again.
Scoped staff are restricted everywhere it counts: transaction lists, invoices, reports, exports and the staff roster all show only their branch. A branch filter in a request is a convenience, never a key — asking for a branch you are not assigned to returns nothing.
When you add an employee, a Branch field appears alongside Department. It defaults to the branch you are currently working in, which is nearly always the right answer. Their pay lands in that branch's profit & loss, so an employee always belongs somewhere.
Working in one branch at a time
Once you have two branches, a branch picker appears in the top bar next to Help and Kiongozi. It answers one question: which shop am I looking at?
| What it shows | What you get |
|---|---|
| All branches | The whole business added together — the default |
| A branch name | Only that shop, everywhere |
Switching is not a filter you have to reapply. Pick Kabalagala and your transaction list, invoices, reports, exports and staff roster are all about Kabalagala until you switch back. New entries recorded from a shared account — the company bank account, say — land there too.
It follows you between devices
The choice is stored on your account, not in the browser. Switch to Kabalagala on the office laptop and the phone opens there as well.
Switching is not a permission. It changes what you are looking at, not what you are allowed to see. An owner can switch back whenever they like; somebody assigned to a branch cannot switch out of it, and sees the branch name as a fixed label rather than a picker.
Staff who only ever see their own shop
When you give an employee an account and their employee record names a branch, they are scoped to that branch automatically. From their first sign-in they see their shop's figures and nothing else — there is no extra step, and no way for them to widen it.
If somebody is already assigned to branches, that assignment is left alone: an owner who deliberately gave a manager two shops does not lose it.
Stock per branch
With more than one branch, "twenty units" becomes "twelve here, eight at the other shop" — the difference between confidently promising a customer and disappointing them.
Stock is still counted per money location, not lumped together per branch. That distinction is deliberate: a bar keeps stock behind the bar and in the store room, and the till needs to be able to say "only 2 left at Main Bar — there are 12 at Store Room". A branch's total is the sum of its locations.
In Inventory, the branch picker filters on where stock actually is: a product appears under Ntinda exactly when Ntinda holds some of it. Each location chip names its branch once you have two.
To move stock between branches, see Stock transfers.
Per-branch profit & loss
In Reports, the P&L gains a branch picker. All branches is the whole business; choose one and you get that branch alone.
The parts add up to the whole, so you can finally ask the uncomfortable question — is one branch subsidising another? Businesses regularly discover this has been true for years, and it is not a question you can even ask without per-branch numbers.
What each figure is attached to:
| Which branch it counts towards | |
|---|---|
| A sale or expense | The branch of the till the money moved through |
| A POS shift | The branch of the till it was opened on |
| An invoice | The branch of whoever raised it |
| Money in an unattached account | The main branch |
Money moving through the company bank account lands on the main branch rather than vanishing, so nothing drops out of the totals.
Several tills in one shop
Several tills at the same branch is a different problem, handled by the desktop app: tills tell each other what they have sold over your local network, so counts stay in step and two counters do not sell the last item twice. It needs no setup and no internet.
Closing a branch
Select Close on the branch card. Closing hides it from pickers and stops it being used — it does not erase what happened there. The history stays, and the branch's past numbers stay in your reports.
The main branch cannot be closed. Make another branch the main one first.
Plans
Branches are a paid feature. Every paid plan — Basic, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and any custom plan we have agreed with you — includes them. Only the Free plan is single-branch.
Two things worth knowing:
- The charge is for opening a second place. A business with one branch never meets the limit, because it is not using the feature.
- If your plan lapses, you keep your branches and keep trading. You simply cannot open another one. We are not going to take a shop away from you over billing.
Practical advice
Count each branch separately, on the same day. Counting on different days guarantees the totals never agree.
Give each branch its own tills. Shared ones make it impossible to tell which site is short.
Assign staff to branches so payroll cost lands where the work happened.
Record every transfer. Most "missing" stock in a multi-branch business is sitting at another branch, moved without a record. See Stock transfers.
Already running two businesses that are really one shop?
Some people set up a second business profile because branches did not exist yet. That works, but it splits your customers, your products and your books in two.
Talk to us before merging anything — we would rather show you exactly what would change first than convert your data and hope.