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What is a Menu?

A menu is a list of products that your customers may order from. In Connect, you can control which items may be ordered for delivery on which days. You can even control which menus may be ordered from at specific locations and on specific days. It can be as complex or simple as you wish.

When thinking about how to create your menus, consider your overall plan. Do you offer the same product list to all customers? If so, you can create one menu and serve all your customers from this single menu.

If you serve different menus to different customers, please contact Lightspeed Support to ask for Menu by Location to be turned on. This feature will allow you to create multiple menus and assign those menus to specific customers.

In this training, we will cover how to create a menu and how to assign products from your product list to the menu.

Create or Edit a Menu

Navigate to the Menus area of the site. On the left side of the screen, you will see a Menus panel that holds all your existing menus.

To create a menu, click on the “New” button at the top left over the Menu list. A window will open that asks you to enter a description of the menu, the display name for the menu, what type of menu this will be, and if this menu should be active.

The Display name is the name your customers will see. If you want the customers to be able to order from this menu, mark the menu as active.

Once you have entered your menu information, click the Create button at the bottom right of the window. Your menu will now be listed in the menu list.

If you would like to edit your menu's description, name, order type, or active status, you may do so by selecting the row of the table for the menu. The row will then be highlighted. Then click the “Edit” button at the top left of the table. A window will open where you can make changes to the menu. Click the “Update” button at the bottom right of the window. Your changes will now appear in the menu table.

Assigning Items to a Menu

Select the menu you wish to add items to. The row will highlight. Two more panels will open to the right of the menu list.

The middle panel has the list of items available to order on this menu. If this is a new menu, it will say “No data available in table." The right panel has your list of products that can be added to the menu.

You may select items one at a time to be placed on the menu, or you can select multiple at once. You can multi-select items by pressing and holding the CTRL key while clicking on the items you want to add.

Once you have selected your item(s), click the “Add Selected” button at the top left of this panel. All selected items will now be assigned to your selected menu and will appear in the Menu Items panel in the center of the screen.

If you want to remove an assigned product, simply select that product(s) in the middle panel and click the “Remove Selected” button at the top left of that panel. The item will no longer be attached to the menu.

Menu Scheduling and Deadlines

Order Period / Deadlines

Connect allows you to control what products your customers can order for delivery, as well as on what days. To control ordering availability, we need to schedule an order period.

Once you have created a menu, proceed to the Schedule area of the Connect site. On the left, you will see a deadline panel.

Here you will see the schedule type. It has two settings – Calendar Week and Lead Days.

Calendar Week

This setting allows you to choose a week that your customers are currently able to order for.

Click the week you wish your customers to currently order for. The week will turn blue.

Determine which day of the week you would like your schedule to roll to the following week.

For example, let's say our Cutoff Day is set to Fridays, and the Cutoff Time is set to 11:59 PM.

If today is Wednesday, July 7th, and our customers are currently ordering for the week of July 11th, then on Friday, July 9th, our calendar ordering week will automatically move forward to the week of July 18th. No additional orders will be accepted for the week of the 11th.

Be sure to click the blue Save button when you are finished setting up your ordering period.

Lead Days

This setting allows you to let your customer place orders for 1 or 2 weeks with a rolling cut-off period in days.

Lead Time in Days" means our customers cannot order closer than X days from today. For example, if today is July 7th, the customer would be able to early for a 2-week period starting on July 9th. Then tomorrow they would be able to order for a 2-week period starting on July 10th.

Be sure to click the blue save button when you are finished adjusting your settings.

Scheduling a Menu

Now that you have set up your order period and order deadlines, we need to schedule at least one menu. Some clients will use only one menu for their entire operation, whereas other clients may have many menus that are restricted to certain customers. However you choose to handle your customer's menus, each menu must be scheduled. This is how you control which delivery days your customers can order certain products.

On the right side of the Schedule screen, you will see a panel called Schedule. In this example, we will choose to make this menu available every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, so we will right-click the first available Tuesday, which based on our ordering schedule would be July 10th. In the menu that pops up, we will click on “New All Day Event.” It is particularly important to always choose All Day Events.

A new window opens that allows you to enter some appointment information.

Enter a name in the subject line. This name will be what you see on the calendar, so it should have some meaning in relation to the menu you are scheduling. In our example, we are going to enter Lightspeed for the subject line. Confirm “All day event” is checked.

Now select the Resource dropdown. Here, you will see a list of your active menus. Select the menu you would like to schedule. For our example, we will be scheduling “Week 1” for Lightspeed.

The last step we need to think about is how often we want this menu to be available to our customers. Let's schedule this menu to be available until Sept 1st. Now we need to check the “Recurrence” checkbox in the lower left of the event panel.

Some additional options will now open. We will select Weekly for weekly scheduling and check the boxes for Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. We could make this repeat indefinitely, but we only want it to run through Sept 1, so we click “End By” and change the date to 9/1.

Click “OK” to save, and the box closes. We can now see our menu on the monthly view of the calendar with the subject of Lightspeed, and we can see that is recurring on the days of the week we chose.

Tips

Sometimes, you may want to identify how often a menu is scheduled but you may have forgotten the event titles on the calendar. You can click on the dropdown in the top left of the schedule panel that says Calendar. Select Menu and the calendar will now shift from showing events to showing menus. Let’s say you are looking for which appointments have the Week 1 menu available. On the list of menus, simply select Week 1 and all events with that menu will populate the calendar.

Menu By Location

Why Use Menu by Location?

The standard Connect setup allows you to make menus and give your customers access to those menus when they are scheduled. However, you may wish to be a bit more restrictive with the menus. For example, you may have a customer that wants only Nut-Free Items on his menu or a customer that has requested only a small list of items be made available for ordering at his location.

If you require this option, please let your support agent know to turn on “Menu By Location” for your Connect Site. Once this feature is turned on, you will need to designate permissions for each customer location and menu combination.

Designating Menu Locations

Navigate to the Menus screen in Connect. In the Menus panel on the left side of the page, click on the Menu you would like to grant access to. In the center of the screen, click on the Menu Locations Tab. A list of Customers and Locations will appear.

Check the checkbox next to each customer and location you wish to grant access to order from this menu. If you wish to give access to all customers and locations, you can check the checkbox in the header row of the location table.

Now that certain locations have rights to this menu, those locations can order from it anytime the menu is scheduled.

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