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Your Subscription and Locations

Culinary Key bills by the number of Locations you choose to pay for. Nothing you do inside the app changes your bill on its own — that is deliberate.

Last updated 2 min read training, culinary key

Your Subscription and Locations

Billing is straightforward, and worth understanding before you start creating Locations.

What You Pay For

You pay for a number of Locations — physical premises. You choose that number when you subscribe, and it acts as your limit.

Areas are not charged. A Location with a Front and a Back is one Location. Staff on your staff list are not charged either.

If you have bought three Locations, you can run three active ones. Attempting to create a fourth tells you the location limit is reached and asks you to increase your subscription.

Only active Locations count. A suspended Location does not use a slot, so suspending one frees capacity for another — though, as below, it does not change what you pay.

During a free trial the limit is not enforced, so you can set the account up properly before committing to a number.

Nothing Changes Your Bill Automatically

This is the part worth knowing.

Creating, deleting or suspending a Location does not change what you pay. Your bill only changes when you deliberately change your subscription.

That is a deliberate choice. Billing that moved every time you reorganised a site would produce a stream of part-month adjustments and make an annual plan almost impossible to reason about. Instead, the number you pay for is a number you set — and it stays put until you change it.

The practical consequence: if you close a site, remember to reduce your subscription. The app will not do it for you, and it will not quietly bill you less either.

Changing How Many Locations You Have

Go to Admin → Subscription. From there you can adjust how many Locations your plan covers, and manage your payment details and invoices.

Increase it before you need the extra Location, since the limit is enforced at the moment you try to create one.

Closing a Site

If a site closes, you have two options, and they are genuinely different.

Suspending keeps its records available. This is usually what you want — food safety records need to be retained after a site stops trading, and an inspector or an insurer may still ask for them. A suspended Location stops counting toward your limit, so the slot is free for another premises.

Deleting removes the Location and its associated records. Download an export first — Admin → Export Records — if there is any chance you will need the history.

Neither one reduces your bill on its own. If you no longer need the capacity, reduce your subscription separately.

Who Can Change It

Subscription changes are owner-only. Managers and staff cannot see or alter billing, which is why most people should be invited as Staff rather than given broader access.

If You Close the Account Entirely

Your records are deleted 90 days after an account closes. That is a commitment in the privacy policy, and it applies to everything equally — there is no record type that is quietly kept for longer.

So take an export before you close, from Admin → Export Records. Any obligation to keep records past that point is your business's, and the export is how you meet it; after the 90 days the data cannot be recovered from us.

Next in this series

Your First Day in Culinary KeyA short orientation to Culinary Key — what it does, where everything lives, and what to do first.How Culinary Key Is StructuredAlmost every question about where a record "went" comes down to one thing: Culinary Key keeps some records for a whole premises and others for a single area witCreating Your First LocationA Location in Culinary Key is more than a name — it’s the single source of truth for one physical location. Set it up properly and every checklist, staff assignment