Franchise operations

Franchise operations is a separate brand-level console for a network of independently operated franchisee workspaces and company-owned stores. It is a custom deployment rather than a self-serve plan toggle; see the feature page and contact us with your store count and ownership model.

The network scoreboard, a store drill-down, completed royalty statements, and a published governance version in the real brand console with fictional demo data.

Franchise or multi-store?

Use multi-store when several company-owned locations share one BenchKey workspace, customer base and team.

Use franchise operations when stores belong to separate franchisee workspaces but corporate needs a bounded brand layer for performance rollups, standards, royalties, warranty support and rollout. The two models can coexist: a franchisee workspace can itself have more than one operating location.

Access and data boundaries

Brand members sign into the Brand console. The brand dashboard reads brand-level rollups rather than querying a franchisee’s live workspace for every page view. The overview and store directory make corporate access state visible as Granted, Off or Revoked.

That distinction is intentional:

• Brand reporting can continue from the data explicitly rolled up to the brand layer.
• Deeper access to a franchisee workspace is separate and consented.
• Warranty lookup results contain store, repair, date and warranty fields, not customer fields.
• Governance, royalty, statement-payment and provisioning writes are limited to brand owners and admins. Other brand roles can use the read surfaces allowed to them.

Read the network dashboard

The Overview shows store count, active franchisees, corporate-access count and brand-team count. Performance appears after the first nightly rollup; a brand with no rollups yet is labeled Collecting data rather than showing invented zeros.

Open Dashboard to:

1. Choose Today, Week, Month or Quarter.
2. Group the ranking by Stores or Franchisees.
3. Filter All stores, Franchise or Company cohorts.
4. Sort by revenue, invoiced revenue, ticket count, turnaround or name.

Rows show prior-period movement and same-store year-over-year movement when a comparable prior year exists. Exceptions call out stale metrics, past-due subscriptions, revoked access, no sales, negative revenue trends and incomplete setup. Mixed-currency totals are labeled as a numeric blend rather than presented as converted money.

Select a store row for its 30-day, 90-day or one-year daily series, revenue trend, setup checklist and royalty-statement history.

Search the store directory

The Stores tab searches name, city, state and store label. Each row shows:

• Franchise or company ownership
• Billing status
• Corporate access state
• Active, inactive or other tenant status

This is the network roster, not an unbounded master login.

Publish operating standards

The Governance tab manages four versioned configuration kinds:

• Templates
• Ticket statuses
• Canned responses for tickets or leads, by email or SMS
• Terms

Author a new version or import the current configuration from a known-good store. Select a version to preview it, then Publish to all stores. The apply report records the result per store; if a subset fails, Re-push failed targets only those stores.

Published templates, statuses and canned responses become read-only in the franchisee workspace and carry a managed-by-brand marker. Terms are advisory and are not locked.

Configure royalties

Open Rules to define an effective-dated brand default, franchisee override or store override. Each rule can combine:

• Basis: invoiced revenue net of refunds, collected cash or labor only
• Royalty percentage
• Minimum royalty floor
• Ad-fund percentage
• Flat fee charged per statement, month, quarter or year

Open Statements, choose a month and generate drafts. A statement is issued per franchisee and breaks the calculation into store lines. Review the basis, percentages, any applied floor, ad fund, flat fee and total before finalizing.

Mark final & notify franchisee freezes the amounts and emails the franchisee owner. From there, record unpaid, partial, paid or waived status, the amount received and payment date. Statements export to CSV.

The A/R aging tab groups outstanding finalized statements into current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ day buckets, with chronic-late flags and the finalized ad-fund total.

BenchKey calculates and tracks this ledger; the current console records payment status and does not claim to auto-debit franchisees.

Look up a warranty across stores

In Warranty, enter an IMEI or serial number. BenchKey searches warranty records across the brand and returns the store, repair summary, repair date, warranty date and whether it is in warranty.

The raw device identifier is hashed server-side before the brand-master lookup, and the results do not include customer identity fields.

Publish the store locator

The Website tab provides:

• A hosted public location page
• A copyable iframe embed for the brand website
• A plain-link snippet
• A CORS-enabled JSON location feed for a custom frontend

The locator lists active stores with hours. Book here opens that store’s own booking page.

Provision a new franchisee

Brand owners and admins can open New franchisee and work through four steps:

1. Enter the workspace name, owner email, optional store label and franchise/company ownership.
2. Choose the business vertical. The selection seeds categories, statuses and forms for that trade.
3. Assign an optional brand region.
4. Review and send the invite.

The new workspace appears in the store directory immediately and shows Collecting data until its first nightly rollup. The owner receives a sign-in invite. The workspace begins on the standard trial, just like a self-serve signup; commercial franchise terms are handled separately.