Creating a menu and adding products to it

Know what you’re looking at

On the sale screen, the narrow left column is your list of menus. Tap one and the wide area next to it fills with the products in that menu. If a menu holds more than one screenful, numbered page buttons appear underneath on their own.

Go to Management

From the sale screen press Functions (right-hand side), then Home Mode, then the blue Management tile. You’ll use three of these tiles: Department creates the menu, Product fills it, and Configure Sale Page arranges it.

Check the menu doesn’t already exist

You get the list of every menu you already have, with a Search box on the right. Look first. If the menu you want is already there, tap its row to edit it rather than making a second one. Only if nothing matches, press Create at the bottom of the screen.

Name the menu and set its VAT

Two fields at the top really matter:

• Name — the text printed on the button, so keep it short and obvious. Long names shrink to fit and get hard to read across the shop.
• VAT — the rate products in this menu are expected to use. Each product can still differ, but setting it here saves work later.

Age restricted is for alcohol and tobacco, and Shelf edge label required should stay ticked unless you never want shelf labels for these items — the red warning underneath spells out what unticking costs you.

Choose how the menu behaves, then Save

Scroll on down the same form. Two tick boxes decide how this menu works, and they are the ones people miss:

• Sort products alphabetically — tick it and the till orders the product buttons A–Z for you and keeps them that way. Leave it unticked if you’d rather arrange the buttons by hand later on the Configure Sale Page screen. It is one or the other: with it ticked, dragging is switched off.
• Menu button — marks this department as one that appears on the sales menu and in product search. See the warning below before you touch it.

Button color sets the tile colour, and Inherit color to products passes that colour down to any product in the menu that hasn’t got one of its own — handy for colour-coding a whole section. Now press Save. The menu appears on the sale screen straight away.

Find the product — search before you create

Back in Management, press Product. Type part of the name into the Name box above the list (or scan the barcode into the Barcode box). Nearly always the product already exists and simply needs pointing at your new menu.

Look at the results before you act. In the example below, searching APPLE PINK turns up the real product APPLE PINK LADY and a similar-looking apple pink lady box — picking the wrong one, or creating a third, is how shops end up with the wrong price on the shelf. Tap the row you want.

Point the product at your new menu

On the product, change Department to your new menu and press Save / New at the bottom. That is the whole job — the product moves to the new menu immediately. Repeat for each product you want in there.

Two things to glance at while you’re on this screen: Weighable with a unit of kg makes the till read the scale instead of asking for a quantity (the tile then shows /KG after the price), and if the VAT figure turns red it means this product’s rate no longer matches the rate on its department. That’s allowed — the till is just making sure you meant it.

Put the menu where you want it

A brand-new menu lands wherever there was room, which is rarely where you want it. Go to Management → Configure Sale Page. This shows the sale screen as your staff will see it, with editing switched on.

Tap your menu tile to select it — it gets a red outline, and the Move Pad on the right wakes up and shows where the tile currently sits (here R4 / R: row 4, right-hand column).

Now move it into the next free space under the menu above it — in this example, under Bakery Menu. Press ▼ to step it down a row, then ◀ to put it in the left-hand column. The readout changes to R5 / L and the tile jumps to its new home. If you prefer, you can simply drag the tile where you want it — the Move Pad is there for when dragging is fiddly on a touch screen.

Nothing is kept until you press the green Save at the bottom. Down there you can also set Row count (fewer rows means bigger buttons) and nudge the Departments and Products font sizes with − and +. Product tiles have their own 1x / 1.5x / 2x / 3x size strip, a colour square, and a tick box to hide them.

Check it on the sale screen

Go back to Sales. Your new menu is sitting exactly where you put it — here directly under Bakery Menu — and tapping it shows the products you put in it. The sale screen picks up changes on its own within a few seconds; if you’re impatient, the R button in the top-right corner reloads it immediately.