Building the Menu

Everything the POS can sell is defined under Kitchen in the main menu. The model is a short chain: a food item belongs to a category, a category belongs to a department, and the department decides which kitchen printer the order slip goes to. Prices never live on the item itself — they live on its variants — and anything sold on top of an item is an addon.

Menu changes are made on the main branch. Branches read the same records, so a name or price edited once is that name and price everywhere.

Categories#

Categories group items on the POS screen (Burgers, Beverages, Deals) and are the level where several behaviours are set:

• Food department — where the category's kitchen tickets print — and consumption department — whose stock its recipes consume. The two can differ: a fried-chicken category can print to the kitchen while consuming from the main store.
• Tax — the rate the whole category carries.
• Ready time — optional minutes-to-prepare that the kitchen display and online ordering can show, used when "use category ready time" is on.
• Available for online ordering and Featured — what the customer app and website show, and highlight.
• Sorting order and category code — POS display order and your own numbering.

The Bulk Edit button opens the whole category list as a spreadsheet grid — names, dropdowns and checkboxes edited in place, with only the cells you touched being saved. Reordering a menu or retagging departments takes minutes instead of a modal per category.

Items#

An item is what the cashier taps. Beyond the name (in every language you run), category and food number, the fields that change behaviour:

• Type — single or combo. A combo is a deal.
• Allowed order types — which channels can sell it (Dine-In, Take-Away, Delivery, Third Party, Car Service).
• Not for sale — keeps the item defined (recipes, history intact) but off the POS.
• Available for online ordering — per-item switch for the customer-facing channels.
• Offer — mark an item as an offer with a start and end time.
• Partial quantity — allow fractional quantities in a step you choose (half-litre scoops, 250 g portions).
• Ready time, image, description, tags, allergens, nutrition — what kitchen screens and online menus display.

If your business runs location-wise items, each item also carries the branch locations it is available at, and the list gains bulk Add to / Remove from Location actions.

Variants — where prices live#

A variant is the size or version an item is sold in: Small / Medium / Large as one item, not three. The variant carries the sale price, its own number, an is default flag (what the POS picks when the cashier doesn't choose), and its own not for sale switch. An item with no variant cannot be sold — single-size items simply have one variant.

Branch- or channel-specific pricing is set from the item's Add Selling Prices screen: a matrix of variant × price group, so the delivery price and the dine-in price can differ without duplicating the item.

For sweeping price work, Bulk Price Update opens the menu as a spreadsheet — filter by category or search, edit prices in place, save once.

Deals#

A deal is an item of type combo: it bundles component items (each with size, unit price and quantity) at a deal price shown against the components' real price. The components still reach their own kitchen departments and still consume their own recipes — the bundle only changes what the customer pays.

Menu tools#

The Kitchen Overview tab ends with bulk jobs that act on the whole menu at once — a menu health check (missing SKUs, duplicated numbers, items with no category, variants priced at zero), SKU formatting and padding, filling or renumbering SKUs, merging same-name items, splitting variants into items, and tidying item names. Every tool that writes shows a preview of exactly what it would change before it changes anything, and only runs on the main branch.

To move the whole menu in or out as a spreadsheet, see Menu import & export.