An operations board for businesses running many locations. It carries messages, but it is not a chat app — and that distinction is the entire design.
Most multi-site operators run on WhatsApp groups. They work until the day someone asks a question the group cannot answer: did site 14 see the recall notice, and who confirmed it?
Two ticks mean a phone received a message. They do not mean a person at a counter read it, and they will not stand up in a compliance review.
The shop-floor PC is a shared workstation. Three terminals two feet apart at a reception counter, used by whoever is standing there. Forcing individual logins produces either constant friction or everyone using whoever signed in first — which yields an audit trail that is worse than none, because it looks true.
So the machine is the principal. Receipts read “opened on Reception‑2 at 09:14” — verifiable, and honest about what it knows.
A reverse-chronological feed buries the morning’s notice by lunch. Kestrelay pins what matters above the conversation and keeps it there until it expires or is acknowledged.
Stock count moved to Thursday. Sheets are in the back office.
October rota.pdf
The tray icon carries the sum. Clicking a category files the report under it — no dropdown to get wrong.
Most systems collapse delivery and reading into one event. On an always-on screen that is fatal — the window is permanently visible, so everything would mark itself read the instant it rendered, and read coverage would quietly become meaningless.
Each location sees only its own messages and its own files. There is no cross-site messaging, by design. Supervisors are scoped to the sites they cover and, optionally, to a single category — so a maintenance supervisor sees maintenance, across their sites, and nothing else.
Isolation is enforced in the database itself, not only in application code. A connection without a tenant context returns zero rows, not everything.
Broadcast-only systems die within a month. Staff file something, hear nothing, decide it is a black hole, and go back to phoning the supervisor.
So requests carry a status the site can see — open, in progress, resolved — and a maintenance photo can be attached by scanning a code with any phone, because the counter PC has no camera.
Kestrelay is being built alongside its first operator, a 24‑site group. It is not open for general signup yet.
If you run multiple locations and this describes a problem you have, write to hello@kestrelay.com.