Aloha - Receipt printing issues... 1

[Rulother]

This is not so much an issue as I am trying to find a work around for a restaurant that I'm setting up their menus for. Just to give an idea, they about 200~ draft beers and 140~ bottled beers and a complete menu with lots of options as well. I'm in the processing of figuring out how to organize it all in a quick and condensed manner. What I did was created a menu that has Drafts, Bottled etc as submenus and within those submenus buttons that lead to modifier groups of the beers. Reason I'm doing this is to help break down and group the beers so the server/bartender can find the beers easily. For example under Draft Beers, I have the buttons Drafts A-G, H-O, M-R and so on. Now these buttons force modify out to other groups that contain the actual beers. My current problem is when you print the receipt for the customer it will read out "Draft Beer A-G" and Beer XXX under that. Is there any way I can prevent the long name of Drafts A-G from being displayed? Or does anyone have any other recommendations?

Thanks

 

[MenulinkMan]

I always setup my submenu's to hold the beers. I had Submenu 1 named Draft A-D, 2 named Draft E-H, etc..same with bottles. This then let the guest see the long name of the beer only, helped with using Aloha Loyalty, and allowed us to easily use Menulink to handle the modifiers of Mugs, pitchers, and growlers. The company had approximately 140 on draft and 200 bottle per site, so that equaled around 5 draft submenus and 6 bottle submenus ( this allowed space to add new beers when an existing keg was low ).

 

[Rulother]

That's the way they have it now, I was just looking for a way for the employee to go through the menu quicker and in a more concise manner. That and all the other locations have different setups, so I'm trying to standardize everything as well.

 

[Rulother]

On the other hand that's pretty similar to amount of beers and bottles this company has, would you be willing to tell me how you broke that down? I've been trying to come up with one myself as well. Any leads would be greatly appreciated.

 

[AlohaRoss]

rulother, the issue with order by modifier and not by submenu will become apparent when you run a Pmix report. Doing it this way your pmix would have all the sales with the item Draft deer and not with the actual draft beer ordered. Horrible for tracking sales.

MenuLinkman has a good idea of creating many submenus. However this leads to staff flipping through many submenus to order something.

I have done it a bit different and used the PLU key as look up. I have asked the restaurant to use a BIN number printed on the menu that reflects the item number in Aloha. In doing so I can have 1 buttom placed on many submenus, and all staff would know the item number as its printed right on the menus. It also helps with customers who may fear ordering an item because they dont know the correct pronunciation. "All have a pint of beer 10253" can be easier than "I will have a pint of Gustogeroogerbottom summer series IPA" (made up name)

You can also enable item look up and staff can just typing full name but this does take longer

The idea is to keep the menu to know more than 16 sub menus so staff are not flipping through endless submenus to order an item. Speed is key and a PLU number works great for wines as well.

A few other points about organization of submenus. Keep them symmetrical. It is very distracting on the eyes when items are placed all over the submenu
use the 4 corners for the 4 most popular items on that submenu. Our eyes naturally catch the edges before the middle.

Alphabetical left to right is more natural for English readers than alphabetical up and down.

Bartenders first submenu should be the 24 items they order most
Servers first submenu should also have the top 24 items ordered assuming you are using a 3 X 8 submenu.
Different jobs should not have same layout of submenus

Condense submenus, only have 4 soups 4 salads and 8 apps. Make 1 submenu for all 16 items call it starters or Soup,Sald&Apps
Use panel editor to add some color and font change to your submenus to make items stand out.

Lastly dont CAPITALIZE your items, it just hard on the eyes to read

These are just some of the guide lines I use when tasked to write a menu or rewrite. Want more suggestions, find be from the link below

AlohaRoss

http://www.needaholahelp.com

3rd Party support

 

[Rulother]

Ross, I like your idea, but not entirely sure how to setup a PLU as a lookup function within CFC or even setting up BIN entries. Could you enlighten me a bit there, thanks.

 

[AlohaRoss]

Look for the option to enable PLU in store settings, order entry. It will appear in position 21 unless other item is in position 21 already. It will not show in BOH only FOH. Need more help give me a call and I can be more clear. I dont have New Aloha Manager committed to memory the way I have old one.

AlohaRoss

http://www.needaholahelp.com

3rd Party support

 

[Rulother]

Found it, thanks... That is an interesting way to go about. However, they would need to change just about everything to make it work. Though I would love to make this work.

 

[AlohaRoss]

or on next printing of menus you add the numbers aleady in Aloha to it.
The reason I spend a lot of time rewriting menus for people is because of the way Aloha set them up from the start. Just look at any of there sample databases, they are put together in a way that makes no sense. If you want to see one of my databases, let me know. Its setup for quick programming and ease of access

AlohaRoss

http://www.needaholahelp.com

3rd Party support

 

[MenulinkMan]

I broke my database down by category of items. 1000 - 1999 could be salads, 2000 - 2999 for burgers, 3000 - 3999 chicken sandwiches, etc....I had a 5k range for all my modifiers that I broke down by category as well. Beers I left 10k for bottles and 20k for draught since we pushed through beer like no other. When I left that company, I had personally entered 6k beers in the POS in 5 years.

Now, each submenu had a range, lets say, of 6-8 alphabetic letters. This allowed us to separate them into logical sections for each beer to reside. Instead of having a separate item for each mug/pitcher/pint/growler, we used modifiers. I had 1 modifier named mug, 1 named pitcher, and one named growler. Each draught beer that we did not consider a high grav had this mod group assigned. If a guest wanted a pint of Gustogeroogerbottom summer series IPA, you clicked the button. If they were high enough in the loyalty program to earn a mug, you would ring in the pint, and modify it with the mug button. The pitcher did the same, and that let us do a consistent pitcher upcharge of 3.5%. Since we used NCR's Menulink/BackOffice program, this let me edit the modifier cross reference tables for recipe reasons.

The company I work for now (large restaurant chain) does the same thing with their beers. Multiple submenu's broken down alphabetically. Servers have food submenu's first, bartenders have LBW submenu's listed first.

Something I do like doing is having all my Bottle Beer Chits in Proper Case, and ALL MY DRAUGHT IN UPPER CASE. The POS buttons (short name) were proper case, same with the guest check (long name), but with the difference in the chit printing would let the bartender immediately know if the item being ordered is a draught or bottle beer. There would be no confusion at that point. LBW was proper case as well.

This link can also help you with finding functions and descriptions.
CFC/AM/NAM Online Help

 

[AlohaRoss]

Great idea of upper and lower case for bottle to draft. That would also do well with wine glass v/s bottle. I think I will do that on next database.

AlohaRoss

http://www.needaholahelp.com

3rd Party support

 

[MenulinkMan]

BUD LIGHT
Bud Light Btl

GL Ross Cab
BTL Ross Cab

Absolute

Shot​

Herradura

Margarita​

Salt​

This really helps with NCR Loyalty. If you run a beer club, then a guest can look at their list and see if they have had a beer in either bottle or draught.

 

[Rulother]

Ross, is the Item Lookup feature still a thing with CFC? For the life of me I can't find how to enable it. I have a button on a panel for Item Lookup, in Store Settings I have the correct category selected for item lookup to refer to. However, whenever I click the button it does nothing. I do not see anywhere to enable item lookup on either Order Entry or User Interface for that matter.

 

[Rulother]

I should also add we're running Aloha 6.7

 

[MenulinkMan]

Are you running Configuration Center ( orange CFC icon ) or just Aloha Manager (blue with an A in it)?

 

[Rulother]

CFC

 

[AlohaRoss]

if I remember correctly, you have to enable item lookup in job codes as well. With CFC I still need to see it, Old Aloha (Blue A) I can do in my sleep

AlohaRoss

http://www.needaholahelp.com

3rd Party support

 

[Rulother]

You're a life saver, it is indeed under jobcodes. A heads up for anyone else to make sure you have that (Allow Item Lookup) and Allow Add Item enabled to look up an item and to add that item onto the check.

 

[posrescue]

Before the thread dies... I worked with a country club with over 800 wines a few years back. I had them generate bar codes which they had printed on their wine menus. Menus at the terminals with bar code readers. Worked well.