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Key concepts and vocabulary

BevWerk uses a few words in specific ways. Knowing them makes every other page easier to read, because the product’s structure follows this vocabulary closely.

Your company is the business. A location is a place that pours.

The split decides where a setting lives. Things true of the business — your catalog, your users, your subscription — sit at the company level. Things true of one room — taps, tax rate, address — sit on the location.

BevWerk always works in the context of one active location, which is why the same screen can show different data depending on which room you have selected. See Manage locations and the active location.

The catalog describes beverages in the abstract: Distributors you buy from, Producers who make the beer, Products they make, and Styles those products belong to.

Catalog records are reusable and long-lived. They do not represent stock you own — they represent facts about beer that stay true between deliveries.

Inventory is stock you actually have. An inventory record points at a catalog Product and adds what is true of this one: size, cost, deposit, status.

Inventory splits by format. Kegs is draft; Bottles & Cans is packaged. They are separated because their lifecycles differ, not to make you look in two places.

A Tap is physical hardware. A Taplist is a grouping of taps that a menu can point at. One bar can publish several taplists without rearranging a single line.

BevWerk publishes to four menu surfacesBar Menu, Digital Menu, Paper Menu, and Website Menu. They draw on the same beverages and taplists but are designed independently, because a screen, a printed sheet, and a public web page are read in different circumstances. See Choose the right menu surface.

Catalog describes the beer. Inventory says you have some. Taps and taplists say where it is pouring. Menu surfaces show that to whoever needs to know — staff, guests in the room, or people deciding whether to visit.

Each layer depends on the one before it, which is why an empty menu is usually a missing taplist rather than a broken menu.