The companies, contacts, notifications, and accounting connection you set once so the rest of Bettr Manager fits how your business already runs.
Real help from real food people
Chef Diego runs a real food plant. If this page didn't get you there, tell us — a person reads every message.
Settings is where you tell Bettr Manager how your business is put together: the plants you run, the customers and vendors you buy from and sell to, who hears about what, and the accounting system your books already live in. You set these up once, and the rest of the product — purchasing, production, sales, invoices — leans on them.
A company in Bettr Manager is one physical place or legal entity: a plant, a commissary, a distribution site. Most operations start with one and add more as they grow. Each company keeps its own products, stock, orders, and records, and you move between them with the company switcher in the sidebar.
Open Companies to add one or edit its details. A company carries its name and short code, a description, its plant address and USDA establishment number, and the time zone its floor works in — so dates and shifts read in local time. It also holds an Odoo company ID that lines it up with your accounting system.
Nothing is deleted for real
Removing a company hides it from every list and the switcher, but its records are kept for audit and it can't be brought back. That holds across Bettr Manager: every change is added to the history, never written over the top of what came before.
Contacts are the businesses you deal with — the vendors you buy ingredients and packaging from, and the customers you sell finished goods to. One contact can be both. Open Contacts to add one, mark it a customer, a vendor, or both, and record how it pays (a payment method and terms, like Credit on Net 30). Purchasing draws its vendors from this list and sales draws its customers, so a contact you add here is the same one a purchase order or sales order picks up later.
Before you buy from a vendor, you qualify it, and its lives on the contact: a risk assessment and a QA contact, plus the six documents an auditor expects — a third-party audit and its report, a Letter of Guarantee, a Certificate of Insurance, a HACCP certificate, and an FDA registration. Until those are in and the contact is approved, its validation reads Pending. Keeping this current is what makes a supplier audit-ready before anyone walks in.
Bettr Manager watches for events worth knowing about — a sales order shipped, a receipt waiting on a QC check — and turns them into notifications. You control two halves of that.
Notification types are the events your company switches on. Each one carries the message it sends, with fields like the order number and customer name that fill themselves in, and the record it points at. Recipients decide who receives each type: a specific person, everyone in a department, or everyone with a role.
The feed is where those land — open Notifications from the sidebar. Unread ones are marked New, opening one jumps straight to the record it's about, and you can mark the whole list read at once.
Most food businesses keep their books in an accounting system long before they adopt an operations platform, and Bettr Manager doesn't ask you to move off it. The Integrations hub connects the one you run on so the two stay in step, instead of your team re-keying between them. Two accounting systems connect today.
QuickBooks covers your accounting and bookkeeping. You connect it once through QuickBooks' own sign-in, and Bettr Manager records which QuickBooks company — its realm — you linked. From the hub you can see the connection and disconnect it.
Odoo works differently from QuickBooks in two ways. First, it needs the Purchasing module, so it comes with the Kitchen plan and up. Kitchen+ Second, you connect it with your Odoo server's own address, database, and sign-in, then use Test connection to confirm the link before you rely on it.
Odoo holds the master data your buying runs on: products, vendors, vendor pricing, product groups, and companies. You bring it into Bettr Manager with a pull — you tick which of those to fetch and run it, and the pull history keeps a record of each one. To keep changes flowing without a manual pull, you add a for your product, vendor, and purchase-order updates. If that URL is ever exposed, you can regenerate it.