A common requirement for restaurants that have more than one location is for the menus to differ at each or some of those locations. Our system can accommodate this by allowing you to specify at which locations your menu times and menu categories will be shown. Using a combination of these filters, you can create practically as many different "versions" of your menu as you need.
Let's illustrate this with an example. Say that you have two locations in your account: one is at 123 Anyplace Lane and the other is at 321 Nowhere Street. Both locations serve lunch and dinner, so you have two menu times. Both locations serve sandwiches at lunch, but 321 Nowhere Street charges slightly more for many of these sandwiches than does 123 Anyplace Lane.
So, how can we do this?
First, we create our two menu times, as usual. On the "create" screen for a menu time, there are checkboxes for each location you currently have in your account. These checkboxes are labeled "Currently Shown at". So, if we want the dinner menu to be shown at both of our locations, we need to check both of these boxes when creating or editing the menu time.
When we create our menu categories (e.g., "Sandwiches"), we see exactly the same kind of thing: one checkbox for each location, allowing you to show or hide that entire category at the given location.
Inside of menu categories go menu items. These are the things people actually order, such as "Ham Sandwich". A menu item can have up to six different prices in each menu time. So, if we have a lunch and a dinner menu, we can create a "Small" and "Medium" price for the lunch menu, and then again for the dinner menu. The prices at dinner might be the same as for lunch, but they might be higher or lower. Or, maybe we don't sell the ham sandwich at dinner at all, in which case we provide no prices for it in that menu time.
But, in this example, we want the sandwich to appear at dinner, at both location, but at the second location, we want it to be one dollar more than at the first location (at dinner).
So, we have two options for accomplishing this. First, we can create two different "Dinner" menu times. When we do this, we can select one to appear at one location and the other one to appear at the second location. Then we create categories to go into that second "Dinner" menu time (since categories can only belong to one menu time at once). Finally, we check the boxes for the Ham Sandwich menu item so that it is assigned to both of the "sandwich" menu categories we created (remember, one is in the first "Dinner" menu time and the other is in the second "Dinner" menu time.
In doing this, we can assign one set of prices to the first menu time and another to the second menu time. We are using the same menu item in both, but since it belongs to two different categories, each of which are shown at only one of the locations in your account, we can assign different prices to that menu item for each of the "Dinner" menu times.
The second option we have is to create a second menu item and a second category and assign the menu item to that category, taking care to show that category only at the second location. The drawback to this method is that you have duplicate menu items that are all the same except maybe for their prices. But, if the prices were not the only differences between the Ham Sandwich at one location and the Ham Sandwich at the other, then this is the method we would want to use.