Locations & Venue Categories
Configure your physical storefronts, organize them into corporate groups, and upload branding that flows across the platform.
Every operational record in GreenSails (a terminal, a cash shift, an order, an inventory count, a menu board) ultimately belongs to a Location. Setting up your locations correctly is the foundation that everything else inherits from, so it is the first thing you should do after creating your organization.
You will find Locations under Catalog → Locations in the dashboard
sidebar. Managing locations requires the locations:view permission, and
creating or editing them requires locations:create / locations:update.
Managing Venue Categories
Location Categories are organizational buckets that group properties for high-level back-office reporting. Instead of analyzing 30 storefronts one by one, you can roll them up into meaningful segments such as "Retail Stores," "Warehouses," "Airport Kiosks," or "Wholesale Hubs."
Create a category
Open the category manager and give the group a clear, reporting-friendly name. Categories are organization-wide, so name them the way you want them to appear in analytics filters.
Assign locations
When you create or edit a location, pick its category. A location belongs to exactly one category at a time.
Filter and report
Once categories are assigned, dashboards and insights can be filtered by category to compare performance across like-for-like venues.
Registering a Physical Location
A location represents one physical storefront, kitchen, or fulfillment point. Walk through the required fields to establish a storefront:
- Venue Name: The customer-facing or internal designation for the property. This appears on receipts, menu boards, and analytics.
- Category Assignment: Links the location to a category so it inherits dashboard visibility and grouped reporting.
- Address & Contact Details: Used on printed documents (receipts, invoices) and customer-facing surfaces.
- Timezone: Critical for menu board scheduling, shift windows, and the nightly AI briefing. All time-based logic for a location is evaluated in its own timezone.
Choose the timezone carefully. Menu board dayparts ("Breakfast 7 to 11am"), cash-shift reporting boundaries, and the automated nightly closing reports all key off the location's timezone. Changing it later shifts when scheduled content goes live.
Operating hours
Set default opening and closing hours for your organization under Settings → Organization. Each location can override those hours in the create or edit dialog.
| Layer | Where to set it | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Settings → Organization | Defaults for new locations; workforce shift templates |
| Location | Catalog → Locations → create/edit | Per-venue hours; overrides org defaults |
Workforce uses these hours to:
- Pre-fill new shift start and end times on the schedule calendar
- Block shifts that start before opening or end after closing
- Soft-flag clock-ins as
before_hoursorafter_hourson time cards
Closing hour still drives nightly AI briefings and stock-taking schedules for that location.
When closing is earlier than opening (for example 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM), GreenSails treats the venue as open overnight. Shifts may cross midnight but cannot span the daytime closed window.
Geofencing for clock-in
When you use Workforce, each location can require staff to be on-site before they clock in from the staff portal.
- Open Catalog → Locations → Settings for the venue (you can also enable geofencing when creating a location).
- Turn on Geofencing.
- Set the pin on the map (or search the address) and choose a radius in meters.
- Save.
| Behavior | What happens |
|---|---|
| Staff portal | Clock-in requires GPS and must fall inside the radius |
| Manager clock-in | Managers with time-card permission can override without GPS |
| Geofencing off | Staff can clock in from assigned locations without sharing GPS |
Soft flags such as early or late still apply separately. See Time cards.
Dual currency
Configure dual currency under Catalog → Locations → Settings for each venue.
Each location has a base currency for menu prices, analytics, and document totals. Optionally enable a secondary currency for POS cash tender and dual-currency invoice display (any ISO 4217 pair).
| Setting | Behavior |
|---|---|
| House rate | 1 base = N secondary. Used first when set. |
| Reference rate | Daily ExchangeRate-API cache (synced to POS). Used when house rate is blank. |
POS terminals pull the effective rate with location context on full sync and keep the last rate cached on the terminal for offline cash settle. Invoices can snapshot a secondary total for PDFs without changing the payable currency. See Taking orders and Invoices.
Tax-inclusive prices at this location
Organization default for tax-inclusive shelf prices lives under Tax & compliance. A location’s stock overrides can inherit that default or force inclusive/exclusive per item. See Items.
Shifts and terminals at a location
A single location often runs multiple Base registers (for example, two counters) plus Satellite handhelds on the floor. Each Base register owns its own financial shifts, including more than one open shift at the same time when both drawers are trading.
Satellites at the location do not open shifts. They save orders when any Base shift is open and rely on a Base register to settle payment into that register's drawer. See Provisioning POS Terminals and The Financial Shift Lifecycle.
Uploading Store Branding Assets
Each location can carry an official storefront logo that renders on receipts and customer-facing interfaces.
| Specification | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Formats | WebP, PNG, JPG, SVG+XML (strictly enforced) |
| Maximum size | 2 MB |
| Recommended | Square aspect ratio, transparent background for dark/light surfaces |
The 2 MB ceiling guarantees instant rendering across receipt prints and customer-facing screens without slowing down a busy checkout line.
What's next
With at least one location in place, you can provision the hardware that runs on the floor.