A common source of confusion for restaurant managers is related to the way the eHungry.com system determines when it ought to send an order to the restaurant.
When an order is placed by a customer, it may not be scheduled to be ready/delivered immediately. It may be scheduled for tomorrow, the next day, or even a week or two from now. By default, the eHungry.com system will hold that order in an "open" state until it needs to send it to the restaurant. During that open period, the order may be edited or canceled by the customer or by a restaurant manager. Once the order has been sent, it is placed into a "closed" state, at which time it can no longer be edited or canceled by the ordering customer (although it may still be changed or deleted by a restaurant manager).
But what does it mean when we say that the system determines "when it needs to send" the order to the restaurant? Well, the simple answer is that you configure your restaurant location(s) to inform the system how long it takes your staff to prepare an order. No customer will be permitted to select "ready time" that is earlier than the current time plus the amount of time it takes to prepare the order. So, any order will have, at the moment it is placed by the customer, a ready time at least far enough in the future to allow it to be prepared and delivered.
There are several methods for telling the system how long it takes to prepare an order. You may specify a certain number of minutes for every XX dollars of an order, and you may do so separately for delivery orders and also for pick-up/dine-in orders. Alternatively, you may specify a threshold, in dollars. Any order under that threshold can be configured to require X minutes, and any order over that threshold would require Y minutes. Again, you may configure separate amounts for delivery as well as for pick-up/dine-in orders.
In addition to these "global" time calculations, you may also specify a minimum preparation time for every menu item on your menu. This item-specific time minimum will override the global calculations, but only if the selected menu item is a part of the customer's order when he/she checks out, and also only if that item-specific time is greater than the global calculation. In other words, the preparation time for any given order will always be at least as long as the longest preparation time specified for any individual menu item included in that order, and might be longer if the global calculation is even longer than that.
So, to summarize with an example, let us imagine that a customer selects a ham sandwich and a soft drink and selects "pick-up" as the order type. You have configured your restaurant location to require 10 minutes for every $10.00 of an pick-up order. The total of this order is $9.75, so the global calculation is 10 minutes (time is incremented in whole chunks of time - if the order total were $10.01, the prep time would be calculated at 20 minutes). So, using this calculation, the earliest the customer would be permitted to make this order "ready at" is ten minutes from now. If he/she did indeed select a time exactly ten minutes from now, then the order will be sent immediately after the order is finalized by the customer.
However, if the ordering customer wanted this order to be ready at noon tomorrow, then the eHungry.com system will hold the order until 11:50 AM tomorrow and then send it to you.
If the ham sandwich in this customer's order has a minimum prep time of 15 minutes, then the order would instead be sent at 11:45 AM tomorrow, since the 15 minutes required to make the sandwich is longer than the 10 minutes that represents the global minimum prep time for this order. Remember, the longest always wins.
Finally, it is possible to tell the system to always send an order to the restaurant immediately when the customer has finalized their order, regardless of the time calculations. The customer will still not be able to select a ready time earlier than the minimum prep time, but once they have chosen an acceptable ready time, the system will not hold the order "open" but ill instead send and close the order as soon as possible. To enable this behavior, simply check the box labeled "Send All Orders Immediately upon Receipt" located on the "Hours and Payment" tab under the extended details for each of your restaurant locations.