Switch Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Automatically

Changing the board at 11am is a job somebody has to remember, every single day, including the day the manager is off. It is also the job a menu board should obviously do by itself.

The problem with doing it by hand

Most restaurants running more than one menu change it manually, and the failure is always the same: the breakfast board is still up at one in the afternoon because the person who normally does it is not in. Guests order from it. Someone has to explain.

It is not a discipline problem. It is a task with no natural reminder attached, in a room where everything else is louder.

How a schedule works here

You give a screen a list of times and menus:

• 6:00 AM → Breakfast
• 11:00 AM → Lunch
• 5:00 PM → Dinner

From then on the screen changes itself, on the days you picked, for good. There is nothing to press and nobody needs to be on site.

It belongs to the screen, not the menu

This matters more than it sounds. A drive-thru and a front counter in the same building often want different timings — the drive-thru goes to the late-night menu at nine while the counter closes at eight. Because a schedule belongs to the screen, each one simply has its own.

It runs on your clock, not ours

Each of your locations carries its own time zone, so 11am means 11am where the television is. A business with sites in two time zones can use identical rules at both and get the right result in each, which is the whole point.

This sounds obvious and is the thing most systems get wrong. A schedule that quietly runs on the server's clock will put breakfast up at two in the morning for anyone outside that time zone.

Setting it up

1. Make a menu for each part of the day — Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. They are just menus; nothing special.
2. Check the location's time zone under Locations. It shows the current local time there, so you can confirm it at a glance.
3. Open Menu boards, find the screen, and choose By time.
4. Add each change: a time, the menu, and the days it applies.

The rule that is in force right now is highlighted, so you can see what the screen should currently be showing without walking to it.

Days of the week

Every rule carries its own days, which is how the awkward cases get handled:

• Weekend brunch. Breakfast runs to 11am Monday to Friday, but to 2pm on Saturday and Sunday — two rules, different days.
• No Monday lunch service. Just leave Monday out of the lunch rule.
• Friday late night. A 9pm rule that only applies on Friday and Saturday.

On a day with no rules at all, nothing goes blank. The screen keeps showing whatever was last set, so Saturday evening's menu simply stays up.

What to check in the first week

Schedules are the kind of thing that work perfectly in testing and surprise you once. Three checks worth doing:

• Watch one changeover. Stand in front of the screen at 11am on day one. It is worth the five minutes.
• Check the time zone, not the time. If a change happens an hour early or late, the rule is fine and the location's time zone is wrong.
• Check it after the clocks change. Daylight saving is handled for you — the time zone, not a fixed offset, is what is stored — but it costs nothing to glance at the board that morning.

What this does not do

Being straight about the edges:

• It changes which saved image is on screen. It does not edit prices inside an image — menus here are pictures, so a new price means a new picture.
• Rules repeat weekly. A one-off Christmas menu is a separate scheduled change rather than a recurring rule.
• Automatic changes need the Multi plan or higher. On Free and Basic you switch menus yourself, which is fine for a single board with one menu.

The quiet benefit

The obvious win is that the board is always right. The real one is that it stops being anybody's job. Nobody arrives early to change it, nobody gets a text about it on their day off, and no guest ever orders from a menu that stopped applying two hours ago.