Menu
Restaurant > Menu is the catalogue the cashier sells from. It has two tabs, Items and Categories, and everything on it belongs to the outlet selected in the header.
Categories are the groups the cashier's menu grid is laid out in, so they should follow how your staff think about the menu rather than how a printed card is organised. Each one has a Name, an optional Color as a hex value, and a Sort order that decides where it sits in the grid.
Create the categories before the items: every item has to belong to one.
An item carries:
- Name: what appears on the grid, the kitchen ticket, and the bill.
- Category: which group it sells under.
- Price: in the outlet's currency.
- Kitchen station: Hot, Cold, Bar, Dessert, or Prep, or None. This routes the line to a column on the kitchen display; an item with no station lands in the Other column.
- Prep time (min): how long the item takes to make. The KDS counts down from this while the line is cooking, then counts the overrun in red.
- Sort order: position within its category.
- Active: switch an item off to take it off the grid without deleting it and losing its sales history.
Prep time is what makes the kitchen timer useful
A line whose item has no prep time shows elapsed time instead of a countdown, so the pass has to remember what late looks like for that dish. Filling prep times in is the cheapest improvement you can make to the KDS.
Modifiers are the choices attached to an item: a cooking temperature, a milk, an extra. Each group on an item has:
- Name: the question, for example "Choose a side".
- Min selections and Max selections: how many options may be chosen. One and one make it a single choice; nought and three make it up to three extras.
- Required: whether the guest must choose. A required group makes the cashier's modifier dialog open before the line can be added, which is what stops a steak reaching the kitchen with no temperature on it.
Each option inside a group has a name and a price adjustment in the outlet's currency. The adjustment is signed, so an option can add to the price or take away from it, and it feeds the line total the cashier and the bill both show.
Groups collapse to a summary line reading whether they are required and how many selections they allow, so a long item is still readable while you edit it.
Editing the menu needs Manage Menu. Staff with only Take Orders see the menu on the cashier screen but cannot change it. See Users and Roles.