Optimise Menu: review and apply suggested fixes to your menu

What Optimise Menu does

Optimise Menu checks your menu for problems that make it harder to read or order from, and lists a suggested fix for each one. You decide what happens: Accept applies the change straight away, Decline hides the suggestion. Nothing changes on your menu until you accept it.

It is most useful right after you import a menu from a delivery platform. Those platforms have no idea of a product with sizes or variants, so an import often lands as six near-identical products where one product with a picker would do, and product names can be cut short.

Where to find it

1. Go to Management > Menu > Menu Setup.
2. Click Optimise Menu at the top right of the page.

Note: If your store uses the company menu, Menu Setup and Optimise Menu are at Company level (no store selected in the switcher). Changes made there apply to every store on the company menu. If your store manages its own menu, use them at Store level with the store selected.

What it checks

Each suggestion is labelled Fix first, High, Medium or Minor so you can start with the ones that lose you orders.

• Best sellers buried in a category: your most-ordered products are not in the first three places of their category. See Putting your best sellers first.
• A new product you could promote: a product you added in the last two weeks that looks like a launch, such as a new main or side with a photo. Accepting marks it New for 30 days, which puts it first in Featured items with a New label. See Promote a new product with the New label.
• Storefront name: your online ordering site's name shares no word with your store or company name, which usually means it was carried over from an old listing or a previous business. If the name is wrong, contact support and we will change it.
• Products still called "Copy [...]": a product you duplicated and never renamed is on your menu under a name like "Copy [1772383746]". Rename it in Menu Setup, or disable it.
• Variants listed as separate products: several products share a name, for example "Loaded Box - Beef and Chips", "Loaded Box - Beef and Rice", "Loaded Box - Chicken and Chips". Accepting merges them into one product with attributes (Beef, Chicken, Combo) so the customer sees one card and picks from it. Options assigned to the originals carry over.
• Names cut short: a product name that was trimmed to fit the 48-character limit and now ends mid-word.
• A choice with no way to choose: the description says "your choice of sauce" or the name says "Chicken or Beef", but the product has no option group, so the kitchen gets orders it cannot make. Where you already have a matching option group, accepting attaches it.
• Something to add that is not on the menu: the description says "add chips, charged separately" and there are no chips on the menu.
• Untidy descriptions: leftover fragments from an import, or American spellings. The suggestion names each edit, for example "“flavor” → “flavour” (British spelling)". It also flags the same long description used on several products. Short lines such as "330ml can" on every drink are fine and are not flagged.
• Missing photos: how many products in each category that customers can see have no image.
• A sauce or dip listed among the mains: a 99p sauce pot sitting between £9 boxes. Accepting moves it to your sides category, creating a "Sides" category if you do not have one. Cheaper versions of a main, such as a lunchtime slice or a kids' burger, are left where they are.
• A price that does not fit the ladder: the one £7.00 on a menu where everything else ends in .99.
• Spelling: common misspellings in product and option names, such as "Siracha". The fix keeps your capitals. "Jalapeno" is a normal spelling and is not changed.

Products that are disabled, or only shown on the till, are left out of the checks about how your menu looks to customers.

Some suggestions need something only you can supply, such as a photo or a price. Those are labelled Needs your input and can only be dismissed.

Accepting a suggestion

1. Read the Change line under the suggestion. It says exactly what will happen.
2. Click Accept. The change is applied immediately and the suggestion moves out of the list.
3. Check the result in Menu Setup or on your online ordering site.

If a change cannot be applied, the suggestion stays in the list with the reason under it. The most common reason is that a product is part of a deal; update the deal first, then accept again.

Applying everything at once

When more than one suggestion can be applied with one click, an Apply all button appears at the top of the page.

1. Click Apply all. A window lists every change that will be made.
2. Click Apply to make them all.

Each change is applied on its own, so if one fails the rest still go through. The message at the top of the page tells you how many were applied and which, if any, failed and why.

Apply all leaves out:

• Suggestions that need your input.
• Re-sorting a category you put in order yourself. Accept those one by one, so you only replace an order you chose on purpose.
• Marking a product New. Each launch is your call, so accept them one by one.

Putting your best sellers first

Customers order from the top of a category, so a best seller in ninth place costs you orders. Optimise Menu looks at how many orders each product appeared on in the last 90 days, across every store that uses the menu, and suggests sorting a category when one of its three best sellers is not in the first three places.

• Categories in alphabetical order (you never set positions, so products are sorted by name) are grouped into one suggestion: Put your best sellers first. It is included in Apply all.
• Categories you ordered yourself get a suggestion each: Best sellers are not at the top of …. Accepting replaces your order, so these are not included in Apply all.

When you accept, the category is sorted by orders, best sellers first. Products that have not sold in the last 90 days keep their current order at the bottom.

Products marked New are the exception: they stay where you put them, and the rest of the category is sorted around them, so a launch is not pushed to the bottom for having no sales yet. Once the New date has passed, they are sorted on their own sales like everything else.

Important: The same positions are used by your till (POS), online ordering and connected apps (see Menu Sorting). Sorting a category by sales also changes the order of its buttons on the till, so let your staff know.

A category needs at least four products and 50 orders in the last 90 days before Optimise Menu suggests sorting it. A suggestion you decline comes back only if your best sellers change. To put a category back in your own order, set the positions again in Menu Setup.

Undoing a change

• Merged products: the original products are moved to the deleted list, not erased. Restore them from Menu Setup if you change your mind, and delete the merged product.
• Sorted categories: set the product positions back in Menu Setup.
• Everything else (names, descriptions, prices, category moves, option assignments) can be edited back in Menu Setup as normal.

Declining a suggestion

Click Decline (or Dismiss for suggestions that need your input). Declined suggestions are listed under Dismissed at the bottom of the page, where Restore brings one back. A declined suggestion stays declined the next time you open Optimise Menu, unless the menu changes in a way that raises it afresh.

Note: Optimise Menu never changes a price on its own. Most checks work from the structure of the menu, so they are just as useful on a brand new store as on a busy one; only the best-seller sorting needs order history.