Build a menu

A menu is the ordered set of products a device shows. A product lives in your catalogue once; a menu is how you arrange products into sections and decide what sells where. You can keep several menus — a daytime menu, a drinks menu, a weekend menu.

Menus versus products

Adding a product to a menu does not create a new product. It places the one you already made. To change a product's price, photo or VAT, edit the product itself under Items → Products — see Create a product. The exception is price: a menu can carry its own price for a product, which only applies on that menu.

Open Menus

From the sidebar, open Items → Menus. Toggle between a tile grid and a list view in the top right. Each card or row shows how many items a menu holds and when it was last changed, plus its actions:

• Settings — service charge and which locations the menu is available in.
• Duplicate — make a full copy of the menu, called "(copy)". It carries every product with this menu's own prices (including modifier options' prices on this menu), every section, every offer, the service charge and the locations it's hidden from. The copy shares the same products — change a product and it changes on both menus — so a sale still shows as one product in your reports. Change the copy's own prices freely; they only apply on the copy. The photo on the card isn't copied.
• Delete — remove the menu.

Use New menu in the top right to create one.

Create and fill a menu

1. 1

   Click New menu

   Give it a name you'll recognise — "Main", "Drinks", "Weekend brunch". It opens straight into the menu builder: your categories down the left, the items in the selected category in the middle, and the details of whichever item you click on the right.

2. 2

   Add categories

   New category creates a section within the menu, like "Hot Drinks" or "Starters". Add existing category pulls in one you already have. Categories are how the menu is divided up, and the left-hand list lets you jump straight to any of them as the menu grows.

3. 3

   Add products to each category

   Add item creates a new product in that category; Add existing item places one from your catalogue. Name, price and till shortcode are editable straight from the list — click a row's arrow to open the full detail panel on the right, where the description, allergens, modifier groups and which menus the item appears on all live. Its Product details (SKU, description, and whether it shows on the till, QR ordering and click & collect) work on a brand-new item too; they are saved when you save the menu.

4. 4

   Reorder and sort

   Grab the ⋮⋮ handle beside a category in the left-hand list and drag it up or down to change the order of your categories. A sub-category always stays under its parent: move "Wine" and "Red wine" comes with it. Inside a category, grab the ⋮⋮ handle at the start of an item's row and drag it to where you want it. To move an item into a different category, use ⋯ → Classic editor. Collapse a category to tidy the view while you work.

5. 5

   Sort a category in one go (optional)

   Click Sort on a category's grey bar and pick A to Z, Most sold (last 90 days), Price: low to high or Price: high to low. It sorts that category once — you can still drag items afterwards, and a later price change won't reshuffle anything. "Most sold" uses the same sales as Reports → Products, across all your sites; items that haven't sold go to the bottom in A to Z order. Price sorts use the price this menu charges.

6. 6

   Set per-menu prices (optional)

   A product can have a different price on this menu than its base price — handy for a happy-hour or event menu. Set it on the product page (product → Menus → this menu's price); leave it blank there to use the base price. In the menu builder, a product with a per-menu price shows it in a locked price box — the note on the box points you to the product page. Its detail panel shows both: Base price (all menus) is the price every other menu charges, and This menu's price is this menu's own. If the product has a recipe, a margin line under the price shows what it makes once VAT is taken off. A product with drink sizes is priced per size instead: open it in the menu builder and use This menu's prices to give each size its own price on this menu. See Per-menu price override.

7. 7

   Save

   Click Save in the top bar — dragging and sorting only take effect on your devices once you save. It stays greyed out until you actually change something, and while you have unsaved work the bar reads Unsaved changes. Each save bumps the menu's version number, which the bar shows in place of that warning once everything is saved.

Preview the menu

Preview lives in the top bar too, next to Save (on a narrow screen Preview and the other actions sit behind the ⋯ button). It opens the menu in a new tab so you can see how it is laid out before you rely on it. If you try to leave the editor with unsaved changes, you are warned first so you don't lose work.

The classic editor

The menu builder above used to be an optional beta, sitting behind a Try the builder link. It is now what opens when you click a menu. The older drag-and-drop editor has not gone anywhere — it is under ⋯ → Classic editor, and two things still live there and only there:

• Courses. Setting which of your dishes are starters, mains or desserts, including Set course for everything in this category…. Coming in from KDS → Courses takes you straight to the classic editor with that panel already open. See Courses.
• The Offers running order — the order your meal deals appear in on this menu. See Offers and meal deals.

Both editors save to the same menu, so it is safe to move between them. Save your work before you switch.

Give a menu a photo

Each menu can carry its own photo. On Items → Menus, use the Photo action on a menu's card to upload one, replace it, or remove it.

The photo is optional. A menu without one shows its initial instead, exactly as before, so there is nothing to do if you would rather not use photos.

Where the photo appears:

• On the Menus page itself, on the menu's card and in the list view.
• To customers, when they can choose between two or more of your menus. The chooser shows each menu as a photo tile, which makes picking between, say, Food and Drinks much faster than reading two words.

A few practical notes:

• The tile crops to roughly a 4:3 shape, so keep anything important near the horizontal centre.
• JPG, PNG and WebP are accepted. A big photo (up to 30 MB) is shrunk automatically as it uploads, so your online menu stays quick to load.
• Removing a photo deletes the stored image, it does not just hide it.

Categories within a menu

Groups in a menu are built from your categories. A category is reusable across menus — rename it once and it updates everywhere it is used. The same goes for their order: dragging categories into a new order on one menu changes the order on every menu that uses those categories. The order of items inside a category is set per menu. For more on creating and ordering categories, see Organise with categories.

Courses — when each dish goes to the kitchen

If your account has table service and coursing switched on, each product in the editor carries a Course. That is what tells the kitchen whether a dish is a starter, a main, a dessert — or whatever you called your courses.

The names in the picker are your course names, taken from the course structure you set up on the Courses page. If you built a four- or five-course structure, all of it appears here, and the name of the structure in force is shown next to the picker so you can tell which one you're working against. The same names show on the kitchen screen, so the two always agree.

You can set courses from here, or from the Courses page without opening a menu at all — whichever suits what you're doing. In the menu editor there are three ways, and they all land the same place:

• One product at a time — expand a product's row and pick its Course, alongside Abbrev and VAT.
• A whole category at once — Set course for everything in this category… below the item list.
• Any products you like — Assign courses to products… above the categories. Narrow the table by category or by search if the menu is long, tick the products you want — or tick the box in the table header to take everything currently listed — then choose a course and set them all in one go. Handy when your mains are spread across several sections. Changing the category clears whatever you had ticked, so filter first and tick after. Following Assign dishes from the Courses page opens this panel for you.

Drink or food in the menu builder

In the menu builder's product panel, Drink (wet) under Properties marks a product as a drink. Switching it off records the product as food, so reports count it on the food side. A product you never switch stays "not set" until you choose; see Create a product.

Modifiers follow the product, not the menu

Modifiers are attached to products, not to menus. When you add a product that has modifier groups to a menu, those modifiers appear automatically wherever the product is selected — on the till, on QR and on click-and-collect. There's no per-menu modifier setup, and nothing extra to switch on.

So if you add a burger with a "No Onions" group and an "Add a side" upsell to your lunch menu, both options carry onto that menu without any further work. The only things you can change per menu are prices — the product's (above), and a modifier option's, set on the modifier group. See Modifiers and options.

Putting a menu on your devices

Menus are available on every device automatically — there is no per-device "load on device" step. When you save a change, devices pick it up on their next sync; you don't reprint or reconfigure anything.

If you want a menu to show only at certain locations, open the menu card's Settings, untick the sites that shouldn't get it under Available at locations, and click Save in that page's top bar. Otherwise it is available everywhere. (That card and its Save only appear if your account has more than one site.)

What's next

• Add option groups like Size or Milk with modifiers.
• Sell a fixed meal deal with offers.