Build your menu
Where the menu lives, the fastest way to a sellable dish, and the four fields that decide how it bills, prints and looks on the till.
One workspace, not fourteen screens
Everything about what you sell lives at Menu. It is one page with a row of sections across the top — Items, Categories, Modifiers, Menus, Discounts, Units, Dish photos, Image library, and the two ways to bring a menu in.
Older links still work. /items and /menus are addresses this workspace used to have, and both forward to the section they became, keeping any filter you had applied.
The fastest dish
At the bottom of the Items list there is a single row: a name and a price. Type both, save, and the dish is live on the till. It has no category, no tax class and no station yet — and it will still ring up correctly.
That row exists because the alternative is a nine-step form, and a kitchen that is opening tomorrow needs to sell paneer tikka before it needs to decide which printer its ticket goes to.
The full editor is a journey
Opening a dish takes you to the planner, which walks the same nine questions in order: what it is, what goes into it, portion sizes, cost, menu price, tax, which station cooks it, its modifier groups, and a review.
Two things about that rail are worth knowing:
- Steps appear only when they apply. The recipe and cost steps belong to the inventory side of the product; with that module off they are not shown, and every other field still saves. A prep the kitchen makes but never sells has no menu-price step at all.
- The rail tells you what is holding Save. A step that still needs something is marked with an asterisk and says so in words, so a dead Save button always has a stated reason.
The four fields that change behaviour
Most fields are description. These four change what the product does:
- Tax class. A dish with no tax class bills without GST. That is a legitimate state for some businesses and a mistake for most, so the Items list has a filter that shows only the dishes missing one. Use it before your first busy day.
- Station. This decides which kitchen printer or screen the dish's ticket goes to. A dish with no station rides the default routing for the outlet.
- Modifier groups, and their minimum and maximum. The till decides whether tapping the tile opens the choice sheet by reading those two numbers. A group that should be a required size choice, left at a minimum of zero and a maximum of one, becomes optional — and the dish bills at its base price with nobody noticing. Set the minimum to one when a choice is compulsory.
- Short code. A short uppercased code, unique in your menu, that lets someone bill this dish from a keyboard without hunting the grid. Marking a dish a favourite pins it to the star rail instead.
Names, in both languages
Every dish carries a name and a Hindi name. The list shows the other language underneath the primary one, which is how a missing or wrong Hindi name gets noticed and fixed — a blank line under a dish is the prompt.
There is also a separate kitchen name, for when the chit should say something shorter or different from what the guest sees.
Categories, menus and photos
Categories group the tiles on the till and the headings on your online menu. Nearly every kitchen needs them; a dish left uncategorised still sells.
Menus are a different idea, and the names are close enough to confuse. A menu is a *named set of categories scoped to a channel* — the set that shows on the till, and the set that shows online, need not be the same list.
Photos are optional. The till's grid is text-first by default because a name and a price read faster than a picture at a counter; a device can be switched to picture tiles for new staff. Adding a dish photo also gives your online menu something to show.
Taking a dish off
There are two different removals and they are not interchangeable.
Out of stock is for today: the kitchen ran out. It hides the dish from the grid and can be undone in one tap. That is a separate article.
Archive is for a dish you have stopped selling. The dish leaves the list and the till, and every bill that ever included it is untouched — past orders keep their lines, their prices and their tax exactly as they were rung. The Items list has an archived filter, so nothing is ever really gone.
Every change is recorded
Creating, editing and archiving a dish are recorded as events with the account that made them, in the same spine your orders are written to. That is what makes "who changed this price, and when" answerable, and it is why the menu can be rebuilt if it ever needs to be.