Groupware for multi-site restaurant and franchise operations
Head office decides and stores execute, and almost everything that goes wrong lives in the gap between the two: a notice sent at the busiest hour of service, an order placed at midnight in the wrong unit of measure, a shift swap agreed in a chat thread that payroll never saw. NOWORX puts ordering, rosters, day-end and store communication on one record, with an AI agent inside each department chasing what busy people forget. Store staff work from a phone; head office sees every site in one view.
If this keeps happening
The notice went out. Half the stores never saw it.
Promotion changes, price updates and safety instructions get broadcast into a chat group during service, when nobody is looking at a screen. There is no way to tell which stores read it, so the gap only surfaces on the next site visit — with the old signage still up.
Ordering happens after close, in a different format at every store
Managers submit orders at the end of a fourteen-hour day: some in cases, some in units, some by message, some on a form. Head office spends the next morning normalising it all before anything can go to suppliers, and a store that forgot simply gets nothing.
Shift swaps live in a thread; payroll works from a different file
Part-timers arrange cover between themselves, the printed rota gets a pen correction, and the file used to calculate pay is a week behind reality. Month-end disputes get settled from memory, and the store manager usually concedes.
Day-end arrives as a photograph
Cash count, waste and the day's takings are photographed and sent upward. Nothing is comparable between sites, so a store drifting for three weeks looks perfectly normal until someone adds the numbers up at the end of the quarter.
When a manager leaves, the store's knowledge leaves too
The supplier contacts, the service interval on the fryer and the ice machine, the landlord's renewal date — all of it sat with one person. Their replacement rebuilds it from scratch, usually by making the same mistakes once each.
How the work runs in NOWORX
Tap an app name in any step to see what it does.
- 1
Head office publishes, stores confirm
Instead of broadcasting into a group chat, head office publishes to the sites it applies to, and reading is a recorded act rather than an assumption. notice-digest gives every store the short version of what changed and what it must do today; where head office needs a decision back — which stores can take the promotion this week, which shift pattern the region prefers — poll-vote collects it as a countable answer instead of forty replies. Anything requiring action becomes a card in task-board against the store, so the operations manager can see at a glance which four sites are outstanding and chase only those.
- 2
Store ordering on one form, consolidated at head office
Every store orders on the same form with the same units, from a catalogue head office controls, in franchise-orders. The purchasing agent pre-fills each store's draft from its recent pattern and flags what looks wrong for the day of week — a Friday order with Tuesday's volumes, a line quadrupled by a typo — before the store submits, not after the pallet arrives. Supplier contacts, lead times and minimums sit in client-directory so the order can be routed correctly, and the consolidated position lands in sheets for whoever still needs to work in a grid.
- 3
Shift coverage across sites, and the roster payroll actually uses
attendance-board holds who was actually on the floor, including the cover shift arranged at short notice, so the roster and the payroll input stop being two documents. team-calendar makes the week visible across neighbouring sites, which is where cover usually comes from, and requests to swap or extend a shift run through approval-dashboard so the store manager's decision is recorded rather than remembered. At the cut-off, payroll-ledger builds from confirmed hours rather than from a rebuilt spreadsheet.
- 4
Day-end close, and the briefing that lands before opening
Day-end is submitted as structured numbers in daily-report — takings, waste, cash variance, headcount — not as an image, so it can be compared across sites and across weeks. The figures roll into ledger, and anomaly-watch does the reading that nobody has time for: a cash variance that has drifted the same direction for eleven days, a store whose waste doubled after a supplier change. daily-briefing puts the resulting short list in front of the area manager before the first store opens, so the day starts with three specific questions rather than a spreadsheet.
- 5
Equipment, leases and opening a new site
asset-ledger holds each site's equipment with its service history and next interval, so the schedule survives a change of manager and the fryer is serviced before it fails during service. contract-vault keeps leases, franchise agreements and supplier terms with their renewal dates attached, which is the difference between renegotiating and auto-renewing. Opening a new site is a repeatable checklist in task-board — the same sixty items every time — with fit-out spend tracked against plan in expense-insight.
Frequently asked questions
We operate both company-owned and franchised stores. Can franchisees be kept out of head-office data?
Yes. Each store is its own unit, and people see their own store plus whatever head office deliberately publishes to them. A franchised store submits orders, day-end figures and confirmations upward without seeing other stores' numbers, head-office documents or group-level reporting. The separation is structural, not a matter of remembering who to copy.
Store managers are on the floor, not at a desk. Does this work on a phone?
That is the working assumption. Submitting an order, confirming a shift, filing day-end and reading what changed today are phone-sized tasks. The screens that need room — cross-site ordering consolidation, roster planning, month-end — are for the people who actually sit at a desk.
Does this replace our POS or kitchen system?
No. NOWORX doesn't take payments and doesn't run the kitchen. It takes what those systems produce — day-end totals, waste, hours, headcount — and makes it comparable between sites, approvable, and answerable six months later. Your POS stays your POS.
Can the AI agent place orders on its own?
It drafts; a person releases. The agent in the purchasing department can pre-fill an order from the store's pattern, question a quantity that doesn't fit the day, and chase the stores that haven't submitted by the cut-off. Anything that commits money passes through an approval step you define, and the record shows who approved it.
We have dozens of sites. How do we roll out without disrupting trading?
Start with one process across two or three stores — ordering or day-end usually, because both have a hard daily deadline that forces real use. Once those stores have genuinely stopped using the old channel, add sites in batches. Launching five processes across every store in the same week is the reliable way to fail.
Turnover is high. What happens to a store's records when someone leaves?
The records belong to the store, not to the person. Supplier contacts, equipment history, contract dates and every past day-end stay with the site; the leaver's access is withdrawn and their replacement inherits the history on their first shift instead of starting a new notebook.
