Roots HQ Features | Inventory, Customers, Events and Reporting

Products & inventory

Your inventory system decided, once and for everyone, what a product is.

Every platform asks the same questions about everything. A jar of jam gets asked for dimensions; a ceramic mug gets asked for allergens; a one-of-a-kind specimen with its own vendor, cost basis and photographs has nowhere sensible to live at all — so it ends up in a spreadsheet, and the stock count stops matching the shelf.

Product lines YOU define, each asking for the details that line actually has, counted the way that line is actually counted — quantity, variants, or genuinely one-of-a-kind pieces. One inventory list underneath all of it, with per-channel visibility so an item shows up only where you meant to sell it.

Admin · Inventory Setup — the product lines this studio actually sells, and the starters it hasn't needed yet

The Roots HQ item editor for a wheel-thrown bud vase: an always-visible Quick Add card, then collapsible sections, with Product Details asking about Glaze, Kiln temperature, Food safe and Dishwasher safe — Admin · the same editor asks a ceramics studio about glaze and kiln temperature — and keeps the kiln temperature internal

Roots HQ Inventory screen listing products with type, collection, vendor, price, quantity, and active status columns — Admin · Inventory — one list for every item you stock, standard goods and unique specimens alike

Product lines you define — six starters (preserves, baked goods, minerals, skincare, general merchandise, blank) or your own, added and changed at any time without disturbing a single item already savedNative
Your own item fields in ten types, with units, options and defaults — and per-field control over whether each one is collected internally, shown to customers, or bothNative
Turning a field off stops asking for it and never deletes what's already there; cost, vendor and tax fields can't be published at allNative
Three ways to count stock per item: quantity, variants with their own SKU/price/cost/stock, or individual one-of-a-kind pieces at quantity oneNative
Adaptive item editor — an always-visible Quick Add that saves a draft on its own, with six sections that fold away until you need themNative
Duplicate Listing copies what describes the item and refuses to copy its SKU, barcode, QR code, URL, stock, orders or published stateNative
Create five unique pieces in one action — five draft records with their own identity and their own money, plus a bulk quick-edit tableNative
Cottage Food Profile — a compliance and labelling profile with your own jurisdiction, applied per product line and overridable per item, with a recorded source and effective dateNative
Unified Products & Inventory — standard goods and unique mineral/crystal/gemstone specimens share one item type field and one list, not two separate systemsNative
Per-channel visibility: show an item on the website, the POS app, or both, independently of each otherNative
Vendor and sourcing tracking, down to the specimenNative
Your own fields register with the report builder automatically — no second setup stepNative
Specimen-level financials: cost, listing status, and per-item P&L for unique inventory, plus marketplace cross-listingAvailable
AI-assisted price suggestions for mineral specimens, built from comparable sales you choose — always a suggestion you approve, adjust, or override, never applied automaticallyAvailable
Variants are fully modelled and editable in the admin; the public storefront still sells the parent item rather than offering a shopper-facing option selectorLimited

Inventory & catalog deep dive →Unique-item inventory deep dive →Store & commerce deep dive →

Catalog organization

One word — “categories” — doing two incompatible jobs.

The way you organise stock for reporting and accounting is not the way a customer wants to browse. Collapse them into one list and you choose between a shop with fourteen tabs nobody reads, or a back office you can't report on.

Shop Collections are what a shopper browses. Inventory Categories are how you organise stock. A collection gathers many categories; a product appears in several collections without the product or its stock count being duplicated anywhere.

Roots HQ Shop Collections with large cards for Ceramics & Home, Plants & Propagation, Small Goods, an automatic Under $30 collection and a scheduled Holiday Market, showing live counts and status — Admin · Shop Collections — plain-language cards, live counts, and a drag handle built for a thumb

An automatic Roots HQ collection: include products where price is at most 30 and active status is on, but never include products where availability is off — Admin · an automatic collection that keeps itself current against live inventory

Shop Collections and Inventory Categories kept separate — fourteen preserve families can sit inside one shop tab and stay available as customer filtersNative
Four ways to fill a collection: by inventory category, hand-picked, straight from your mineral inventory, or by rulesNative
Automatic collections with grouped include/exclude conditions — category, type, tag, price, availability, seasonal, cottage-food — with AND and OR spelled out, evaluated against live inventoryNative
Scheduled collections in YOUR time zone, with a stated end behaviour: hide, keep visible as Seasonal, or hand over to another collectionNative
Independent visibility per sales channel — website, POS, event ordering, preorders, QR shopping page, private invoice catalogNative
Empty-collection handling you choose: warn me, hide it, show “Coming Soon”, or keep it browsableNative
Archive preserves everything and can be undone; permanent deletion requires typing the collection name and removes only the groupingNative
Sage reviews the arrangement on request — unassigned products, empty collections, missing images, duplicate names — and never moves, renames, hides or deletes anything itselfNative
Each collection is a tab on the shop page; individual collections do not yet have their own landing-page URLLimited

Inventory & catalog deep dive →Website & storefront deep dive →

Customers & growth

Winning a customer once, then never seeing them again.

Discounts, giveaways, prize wheels, loyalty perks, and email campaigns each end up in their own tool, so there's no single place to see what's actually running — or who it's actually for.

Contacts, segments, campaigns, and every kind of promotion — coupons, prize wheels, giveaways, loyalty, special offers — live in one Promotions hub with one Active Promotions table, so nothing is a spreadsheet away from being forgotten.

Promotions hub: coupons & discounts, prize wheels, giveaways, loyalty & rewards, and special offers in one page, with a guided "what are you trying to do?" builderNative
Customer-group targeting on coupons, automatic discounts, and giveaway entry — enforced at checkout or entry, not just labeled, and the group name is never shown to the publicNative
Unified contact records, segments built by behavior and attributes, and a shared support inboxNative
Multi-step automations — a background engine evaluates active workflows on a schedule and only ever acts on what happens after a workflow is switched onNative
Email campaigns built from content blocks, with live desktop and mobile preview — sent through your own SMTP providerAvailable
SMS campaigns through your own Twilio number, with opt-out handling and quiet hours applied before anything is sentAvailable
Lead-capture forms that feed straight into the CRMNative
QR codes with click tracking, plus AI-designed printable market flyersAvailable

Marketing & CRM deep dive →See how customer data connects across the platform →

Orders & selling

Orders scattered across a website, live streams, and however many marketplaces you sell on.

Pack-and-ship day means checking a website admin, a live-selling app, and CSV exports from two or three marketplaces — with no shared sense of what's actually paid, shipped, or still sitting in a box.

Every order, from every channel, in one queue — with real fulfillment stages instead of a shared inbox full of guesswork, and a point-of-sale for the moments you're selling face to face.

Roots HQ Orders screen with pending, processing, shipped, and delivered counts, a status filter bar, and order cards showing customer, item count, fulfillment method, and total — Admin · Orders — every channel's orders in one filterable queue, tracked to delivered

A Roots HQ delivery run showing seven stops in solved order with per-leg mileage and ETAs, a route plot, and Solve route, Open in Maps and CSV actions — Admin · a delivery run solved into the shortest round trip, ready to open in Google or Apple Maps

One order queue across channels — filterable by status (processing, awaiting shipment/pickup, shipped, delivered, cancelled, refunded) — tracked through to delivered or picked up, with the customer emailed along the wayNative
Live carrier shipping rates, label purchase, and trackingNative
Local delivery with weekly windows you define — each with its own capacity and cutoff — a radius measured from your own address, and a per-item opt-inNative
Route solving: stops reordered into the shortest round trip, with per-leg mileage and a running ETA. Deterministic maths, not a model — free, instant, and the same answer every timeNative
One-tap export of the solved route into Google Maps or Apple Maps, split into legs when a run is longer than one link can carry, plus CSV for the driverAvailable
Sage plans the delivery day on request — which waiting orders belong on which run, overloaded windows, addresses that need a call — and applies none of it itselfNative
In-person payments (POS): a card reader or keyed card entry through Square's Web Payments SDK — the card is tokenized by Square, never seen or stored in raw form — with the invoice marked paid and a receipt emailed automaticallyAvailable
Phone tap-to-pay: the native Square SDK now ships inside the POS app, but a phone still can't tap to charge until the account has Square's Tap to Pay entitlement and the device itself is Tap-to-Pay eligibleLimited
Marketplace order consolidation: eBay and Etsy sync live via their own order APIs (their platform fees aren't reported by those APIs, so those two channels show $0 in fees until that's connected); Whatnot, Shopify, and Palmstreet import by CSVLimited
Live selling: schedule streams, spotlight products, run auctions, and work a claims/holds queue — orders from a stream land in the same queue as everything elseAvailable

Store & commerce deep dive →Shipping deep dive →Live selling deep dive →

Events & operations

Standing in the driveway, trying to remember if the tablecloths made it into the van.

Every market or pop-up means re-deriving the same packing list from memory, and there's no quick way to check that the cash drawer's starting float is actually what it should be before the doors open.

A reusable packing checklist tied to the real event date and location, with items you always bring added automatically — plus a cash-drawer check that verifies the float without ever counting it as income.

Roots HQ Event Checklists screen with starter templates for Outdoor Market, Indoor Pop-Up, and Teacher/School Event, plus a recent checklist showing packed-item progress — Admin · Event Checklists — “Pack smarter. Forget less.”

Event Checklists: start from a template (Outdoor Market, Indoor Pop-Up, Teacher/School Event, or blank) or build your ownNative
Attach a checklist to a planned market date to pull in the event name, date, and location automaticallyNative
"Always Include" items — star one once and it's added to every future checklistNative
Progress at a glance ("18 of 26 packed"), overall and per sectionNative
Cash Drawer verification: pick a drawer, see the expected float Roots HQ already remembers, type what you actually counted — the variance is shown as a note, never a blocker, and the count is read-only in Ledger → Cash Closeout so it can never be mistaken for incomeNative
Branded, pen-markable printable checklist using your own business name and logoNative
Market & event scheduling, shown on the public siteNative

See the full feature comparison →Connected workflows on the homepage →

Financial tracking & profitability

Piecing together what actually made money from a website, live shows, and a shoebox of receipts.

Sales land in one place, expenses live in a shoebox of paper receipts, mileage is whatever you can remember at tax time, and there's no single view of which product, channel, or event was actually worth running.

Receipts, expenses, vendor costs, payroll, mileage, and payouts tracked in one workspace, with sales and profit reports that break down by product, channel, and event — so you can see what made money, without it becoming the bookkeeping system Roots HQ isn't.

Roots HQ Ledger overview showing money out this month, receipts to review, open payouts, vendor count, a money-out-by-category breakdown, and links to Receipts, Expenses, Vendors, and Payouts — Admin · The Ledger — expenses, receipts, vendors, and payouts in one workspace

Roots HQ Mileage Tracker showing miles this year, miles this month, business trip count, trips needing review, estimated deduction, a quick-entry form, and a recent-trips table with date, purpose, miles, class, and status — Admin · Mileage Tracker — logged trips rolled up toward the Tax Center, labeled an estimate

Roots HQ Reports screen with a date-range picker and one-click Profit, Sales, Expenses, Inventory Value, Top Products, Sales by Channel, Payouts & Fees, and Customers report tiles — Admin · Reports — one-click sales, profit, and channel reports, plus custom report building

The Ledger: expenses, receipts, vendor purchase orders and receiving, and payouts tracked against your real transactions in one workspaceNative
Receipts: photograph a receipt and file it line by line, reusing the same AI-OCR pipeline as the rest of the platformNative
Payroll tracking alongside your other expensesNative
Payouts: processor deposits tracked against sales, with cash-drawer closeouts and live varianceNative
Mileage Tracker: quick or full-detail trip entry, round-trip flag, optional vehicle profiles, and a per-year, per-purpose mileage rate snapshotted on each tripNative
Tax Center: mileage, deductible expenses, sales tax collected, and processing fees rolled up by tax year and broken down by purpose, event, and vehicle, with a review flag if you're deducting both mileage and vehicle expenses in the same year — exported as CSV, Excel, or a print-ready PDF, labeled an organizational summary, not tax adviceNative
One-click Profit, Sales, Expenses, Inventory Value, Top Products, Sales-by-Channel, Payouts & Fees, and Customer reports, plus custom report buildingNative
Profit and expense reports include event-level costs (for example, giveaway and prize-wheel prizes and shipping), so event and channel profitability is visible, not just the company-wide totalNative

Roots HQ is not a replacement for bookkeeping, accounting, or tax software. A double-entry ledger engine exists in the codebase but is enabled for a single internal workspace only — the Ledger screens above never post through it, and there is no tenant-facing reconciliation, AP/AR aging, or period-close workflow.

Financial tracking deep dive →Estimate your current tool stack cost →

Website & brand

Needing a real website, without hiring a developer for every homepage tweak.

A professional storefront usually means either a generic template that looks like everyone else's, or a developer on retainer for anything beyond swapping a photo.

A published, on-brand storefront built from block-based pages you edit yourself, plus a blog with SEO fields and scheduling — and a writing assistant to draft or repurpose the copy.

Storefront · the published result of the block-based page builder, styled to the business's own brand

Website Pages: a block/section visual builder with Guided (starter templates, simple fields), Visual (block canvas and style panel), and Advanced (custom HTML/CSS) modesNative
Blog Studio: publish, schedule, and manage posts, with performance summary cards, SEO fields, and a repurpose panel that drafts social and email versions of a postNative
Media library for images and video, with automatic poster thumbnails generated for uploaded videoNative
The Hearth: recipes and digital cookbooks — see belowNative
Per-tenant branding: colors, logo, and site identity, isolated from every other tenant on the platformNative
Write/Improve with Sage inside the page and blog editors — you review and publish, Sage never publishes on its ownNative

Website & content deep dive →

The Hearth

The recipe exists in four places, and three of them are out of date.

The recipe is in a notes app, retyped into the website, copied again into a PDF cookbook, and pasted into an email. Change one ingredient and you have to remember all four — so eventually you stop bothering, and the versions drift apart.

The recipe is entered once and lives in one place. Cookbooks, your website and your shop all point back at it, so editing it once updates it everywhere it appears.

The Hearth in Roots HQ showing total recipes, recipe books, total views and average saves, with tabs for all recipes, recipe books, favourites, drafts, published and scheduled, above a table of recipes with category, cookbook, status and view count — Admin · The Hearth — every recipe, which cookbooks it appears in, and how it is being read

Smart Paste review screen listing what was detected from a pasted recipe — title, description, prep and cook time, servings, yield and temperature — alongside the parsed ingredient sections and numbered steps, with buttons to build the recipe, go back, or keep it as plain text — Admin · Smart Paste — what it found, shown before anything is saved

A cookbook called From Garden to Jar in Roots HQ, with tenant-named sections Preserves and Drinks holding recipe entries that can be reordered or removed — Admin · a cookbook — chapters you name, holding links to recipes you already have

Smart Paste: paste a recipe from a notes app, a document, an email or an AI chat and it is read into a title, description, times, servings, yield, oven temperature, ingredient sections and numbered stepsNative
Everything Smart Paste detects is shown for review before anything is saved — and keeping your plain text exactly as written is one of the options, not a failure caseNative
Ingredients as plain text (the fastest way) or structured with sections you name, an optional brand, and notesNative
Link an ingredient, or the recipe itself, to a product you sell — so the public recipe can say what it was made with and offer itNative
Steps: paste your directions and split them into individual steps, then reorder, edit, or add a tip to any of themNative
Images and video come from your Media Library or a direct upload — there are no image addresses to pasteNative
Digital cookbooks with your own cover, author, intro and chapter names — nothing about the structure is fixed for youNative
A cookbook holds links to your recipes, never copies: one recipe can sit in several cookbooks, editing it updates all of them, and removing or deleting a cookbook never deletes a recipeNative
Draft, Published, Scheduled, Private, and Unlisted — where Unlisted is reachable by direct link or QR code but is not listed publiclyNative
A public cookbook your customers can actually read, on your own storefront — chapters, recipe cards, and a Cooking Mode that shows one step at a time in large type with two big controls, for a phone on the counter or a tablet propped up in the kitchenNative
Import several recipes at once — from a recipe file exported by another app, a saved recipe web page, or plain text holding several recipes. Everything arrives as a draft for you to look at before it goes anywhere.Native
Recipe analytics: views, saves, shares and clicks through to the products a recipe is made withNative
Sell a cookbook as a digital product: set a price, and customers buy it through your normal checkout. It's an ordinary order — same payment, receipt, reporting and refunds as anything else you sell — and access is unlocked the moment payment lands, including for guests who never made an accountNative

Watch the walkthrough on the homepage →

Sage

One more dashboard to check, one more tool to learn.

Most business software either buries what needs attention under menus you have to remember to check, or bolts on a chatbot that can't actually see your data and can't show you how to use the product it's attached to.

A calm assistant, included in every plan: a short daily brief on the dashboard, grounded answers about your own business (with an optional outside-web lookup), and guided walkthroughs that point at the exact button — Sage drafts and prepares things for you to approve; it never sends, publishes, or applies anything on its own.

Roots HQ dashboard with Sage's Morning Brief banner summarizing orders to prepare and an upcoming event, above today's sales, new contacts, and revenue tiles — Admin · Sage's Morning Brief — a daily summary surfaced right on the dashboard

Roots HQ Sage side panel open over the dashboard, showing Insights, Ask, Help, and History tabs, with an Insights tab reporting nothing currently needs attention — Admin · Sage panel — Insights, Ask, Help, and History in one place

Morning Brief: a short daily summary — orders to prepare, upcoming events — surfaced on the dashboardNative
Insights: proactive daily nudges produced by a deterministic rules engine reading your data on a schedule — not a live AI/LLM call, so it's fast, free to run, and predictableNative
Ask: grounded question-and-answer over a snapshot of your own business data, with an optional outside-web lookup for market questionsNative
Help: a searchable library of guided walkthroughs — a floating on-screen pointer and step-by-step tooltips drive you to the exact button or field, across nearly every feature in the appNative
History: the last 30 days of what you asked Sage and what it answered, including drafts it wrote, pruned automatically after 30 daysNative
Draft assistance: email/SMS copy, blog posts, product copy, and mineral price suggestions from comparables you select — always a draft or suggestion you review and approve, never sent, published, or applied on its ownNative
Included in every plan; usage is metered in fractions of a cent and rolled up monthly into your own Ledger as a real, visible operating expenseNative

See how Sage compares to other platforms’ AI →Read the Sage introduction on the homepage →

Everything to run the business — organized around the problem it solves.