Most of the businesses I build for run one thing. One shop, one kitchen, one studio. But some run several, and the software they are handed was built for the first kind. So they end up with five separate logins, five sets of hours to update, and no single screen that tells them how the whole thing is doing.
I spent the last few weeks building for exactly that, and the shape it wants is a Coop inside a Coop.
A door, not a dropdown
The obvious answer is a location dropdown at the top. Pick a location, the page filters. It works, and it feels like nothing. You never quite know where you are.
So instead, each location is a door. Tap it and you walk into a complete Coop of its own, with its own numbered sections, its own menu, its own screens, its own checklists. And the whole page repaints into that brand’s colours, with the name in the header changing to match.
That sounds like decoration. It is the opposite. It is the thing that tells you, without a word, that you are standing somewhere specific. You can hand a manager a link, and they land in their place, looking like their place.
the small thing that makes it work
A breadcrumb at the top of every page, all the way down. You are never more than one tap from where you came from, and you always know how deep you are.
The numbers count themselves
At the top level there is a board showing the whole group. Locations trading, screens live, who has checked in this week. Not one figure on it is typed in by hand. Every number is counted from the locations underneath.
That matters more than it sounds. A dashboard somebody has to update is a dashboard that drifts, and then quietly becomes fiction. If the board counts what is actually there, it cannot lie to you, and there is no second place to keep current.
What lives where
The other half of the puzzle is deciding which things belong to the group and which belong to a location. Menus, hours, staff and checklists are local. The brand kit, the catering queue, the calendar and the marketing are group-wide.
Get that wrong and somebody edits the brand kit inside one location, reasonably assuming it only changed that location. Getting it right is most of the design work, and none of it shows.
Who this is for
If you run one place, you do not need any of this, and I would not sell it to you. But if you have grown into two or three, and you are doing everything twice, this is the shape that fixes it. It is the same Coop you already understand, just with rooms inside rooms.