The mental model
Every business is a mixture of a few simple building blocks: retail, food, and service, plus access and rental. Learn to see them and you can model anything.
This is the most important page in the guide. Everything else is detail. Spend five minutes here and the rest will make sense quickly.
Why "what kind of business am I?" is the wrong question
Most tools make you pick a category up front — restaurant, shop, salon — and then everything is shaped around that label. The moment your business is a little unusual (a café that also rents its space for events; a clinic that sells supplements), you are fighting the categories.
Cimplify works differently. It doesn't care what label your business wears. It cares about what actually changes hands when a customer pays you. There are only a few possibilities, and your whole catalogue is built from them in different proportions.
The three things that can move
Ask this of every single thing you sell: what does the customer get for their money?
| Building block | What the customer gets | The key trait | You sell it as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail | A physical thing they keep | What you sell is what you count — one sold = one off the shelf | a product |
| Food | Something you made from ingredients | What you sell isn't what you count — a recipe turns stock into the item, with waste | a product made from a recipe |
| Service | Your time, a person, or a space, for a period | Nothing is "in stock"; you sell availability on a calendar | a service (a booking) |
That's the core. Two more shapes show up often enough to name:
- Access / rights — a membership, a class pass, a software licence, a digital download, an event ticket. Nothing physical moves and nothing is consumed; you are granting permission for something. Sold as a digital product, usually on a recurring or instalment billing plan.
- Rental — the customer takes a physical thing and brings it back. It is not a sale (ownership doesn't transfer) and it is not pure service (a real object is involved). It is a booking over a physical unit: the service machinery (a period of time, a deposit, a return) applied to a bookable resource (the actual van, drill, or kayak).
The decision tree
When you (or an agent) look at something a merchant sells, walk this in order. The first match wins.
- Does the customer reserve time — a slot, a date range, or a person? → It's a service. Go to Services. If it ties up a physical thing while it happens (a room, table, court, vehicle), also read Bookable resources.
- Does the customer take a physical thing and return it later? → It's a rental: a multi-day service over a bookable resource. Services + Bookable resources.
- Is it granting access with nothing physical — a membership, pass, licence, ticket, or download? → It's access: a digital product, often on a billing plan.
- Is it made to order from ingredients or parts, where making it consumes stock? → It's food (or light manufacturing). Go to Food.
- Does the customer build it themselves from groups of options (a salad, a custom pizza, a gift box)? → It's still food/retail, but you'll use a build-your-own product.
- Otherwise — is it a finished physical thing you hand over, where one sale = one unit off the shelf? → It's retail. Go to Retail.
A single product is almost always one building block. A single order is often several — and that's fine. Cimplify happily puts a bag of coffee beans (retail), a made-to-order latte (food), and a table booking (service) in one basket.
Real businesses are mixtures
Once you see the building blocks, every business is just a recipe of them. You don't model the business; you model each thing it sells, and the business is the sum.
| Business | The mixture |
|---|---|
| Coffee shop | food (drinks) + a little retail (beans, mugs) |
| Clothing shop | retail |
| Salon / barber | service (appointments) + retail (products) + sometimes a resource (the chair) |
| Restaurant | food + service (tables) |
| Hotel | service (the stay, over resources = rooms) + food + retail (minibar) |
| Gym | access (membership) + service (classes) + retail (supplements) |
| Car / equipment rental | rental (service over vehicle/gear resources) |
| Clinic | service (consults) + retail (medication) |
| Grocer with a deli | retail (packaged) + food (made-to-order) |
| Online course | access (digital product + billing plan) |
| Manufacturer | food's transformation shape with a longer recipe and no rush |
| Subscription box | retail on a recurring timer |
If a business you're modelling isn't in this table, that's expected. Break it into "what moves" line by line and it will be some blend of the same blocks.
Why getting this right pays off
The building block you choose sets the product type, and the product type decides what the rest of the system does for you automatically:
- Choose service and you get a calendar, slots, staff assignment, deposits, and cancellation rules.
- Choose food and you get recipes, ingredient deduction, waste tracking, and the kitchen workflow.
- Choose retail and you get simple stock counts and variants.
- Choose digital and you get downloads, licences, and access grants — with no stock or shipping.
Pick the wrong one and you lose all of that and start improvising. The classic example: modelling a hotel's rooms as a single "15 rooms available" number instead of real room types. It looks fine until you sell one deluxe room and the system marks a standard room as unavailable, because they were sharing one count. The fix isn't a workaround — it's modelling the truth: two room types, each with its own rooms. The whole guide is variations on this one discipline.
Common questions
My business does several of these. Which do I pick? You don't pick one for the business. You pick one per thing you sell. A salon's haircut is a service; the shampoo on the shelf is retail. Model each correctly and they coexist.
What if something seems like two blocks at once? Usually it isn't — look closer at what the customer actually receives. A "spa day package" feels like one thing, but it's a bundle of services. A "build-your-own hamper" is a build-your-own product. Rentals genuinely are a hybrid (service + resource), and that's the one true two-block case — which is exactly why they reuse both systems rather than getting a block of their own.
I'm an agent. How do I decide quickly? Run the decision tree top to bottom on each catalogue item; the first matching rule gives you the product type. Then open that chapter for the exact fields. When unsure between food and retail, ask: does selling it consume tracked ingredients? Yes → food; no → retail.
Is "three building blocks" a hard rule? It's the pattern that holds for the vast majority of commerce, plus access and rental as named hybrids. If you find something that genuinely won't reduce, model it as closely as you can and note it — but in practice almost everything fits.
Next: a hands-on getting started walkthrough, or jump straight to your block — retail, food, or services.
Start here
How to set up any business on Cimplify so the data fits what you actually do. A practical, complete guide for merchants and for the AI agents that help them.
Getting started
A practical walkthrough from an empty account to your first product, menu item, or bookable service — with the order to do things in and the decisions you'll face.