Entity Setup
Entities are the things transactions refer to: registers, employees, revenue centres, terminals. Entity setup is where they are named and grouped.
It looks like housekeeping and is not. Entity names appear on every query result, every statistic, every report and every alert in this module.
Naming
Registers and terminals arrive named after hardware — a serial number, a terminal ID — because that is what the point-of-sale system calls them. Nobody investigating an incident thinks in those terms.
Rename them after where they are:
| Instead of | Use |
|---|---|
TERM-0047 | Main Bar 2 |
POS-11 | Restaurant — Server Station |
RC-3 | Poolside |
The cost of poor names is paid on every query by everyone, forever. The cost of fixing them is one afternoon.
Grouping
Entities can be grouped — registers into areas, areas into venues. Groups do two jobs:
- They are the natural unit for aggregation: comparing three bars is more useful than comparing twenty registers.
- They are what logical groups select on, so a group is how "front of house staff see front of house data" is expressed.
Selecting a group in a logical group also covers registers added to it later, where selecting individual registers does not. That difference is how people quietly lose access to new equipment.
Employees
Employee entities link transactions to people. Where employee records are also subjects in face recognition, a transaction can reach the person and their detection history — which is how "who was actually at the register?" becomes answerable.
Enabling and disabling
Entities can be enabled or disabled. Disable a decommissioned register rather than deleting it: its historical transactions remain attributable, and deleting the entity degrades every past record that referenced it.
Keeping it current
Entity setup goes stale quietly. A register moved, a revenue centre renamed, a terminal replaced — the entity survives and now describes something that no longer exists.
Review when physical changes happen, and check that associations to cameras still point at the right places.
What is recorded
Entity changes are audited under the administration types, so a rename that makes historical results confusing can be traced. See Reading the Audit Trail.