How to Change Prices on a Digital Menu Board

Raising prices is the moment people regret printed menus. Here is what the job actually looks like on a digital board, including the parts that are still manual.

The honest version first

A digital menu board does not let you edit a price the way a spreadsheet does. The menu on screen is a picture, so a new price means new artwork. What it removes is everything that came after that: no printing, no laminating, no driving between sites, no stepping on a chair with a flash drive.

The practical difference is that a price change goes from a half-day errand to about five minutes, and it lands on every screen at once.

Changing a price on every screen at once

The key idea is that screens point at a menu rather than holding a copy. Change the menu, and every screen using it follows. You never update screens one by one.

1. Export the corrected artwork from wherever you design it — Canva, Illustrator, Word, a designer’s file.
2. In Images, find the picture you are replacing and choose Replace.
3. Upload the new file. Every menu using that picture, and every screen showing those menus, updates together.

Replacing rather than uploading a new image matters more than it sounds. If you upload a fresh image instead, you then have to open each menu and swap it over, and the one you forget is the one a customer reads. Replacing keeps all the wiring intact.

Knowing it actually landed

Each screen checks in every five minutes, and the workspace tells you where each one stands: showing your latest, or updating. An offline screen says so plainly rather than pretending the change arrived. That removes the part of this job that causes the most anxiety — wondering whether the board in the other room is still selling at the old price.

Changing a price at one site but not another

Prices often differ by location, and the answer is to stop sharing one menu between them. Make a menu per site — duplicate the one you have, give it the site’s name, and point that site’s screens at the copy. From then on the two move independently, and a change at Main Street cannot reach Riverside by accident.

If most of your pricing is identical and only a few items differ, it is still worth splitting. One shared menu with a mental note about exceptions is how the wrong price ends up on a wall.

Changing a price overnight

Price rises are easier to explain when they appear between services rather than mid-afternoon. Schedule the new artwork for a date and time and it swaps itself, with nobody in the building. The old menu stays up until the moment it is replaced.

If prices differ by time of day rather than by date — lunch pricing until four, dinner pricing after — that is a recurring schedule instead, covered in switching breakfast, lunch and dinner automatically.

Four mistakes worth avoiding

• Uploading instead of replacing. You end up with two near-identical pictures and have to remember which menus point where. Replace the original.
• Changing the artwork size. If the new export is a different shape, it will letterbox or crop. Keep the same dimensions as the picture you are replacing — see menu board image size.
• Forgetting the second screen. If one board is on a different menu, it will not follow. The screens list shows which menu each one is on.
• Not checking an offline board. A screen that is switched off will show the old price the moment it comes back. Turn on offline alerts so you find out before a customer does.

What this does not do

Being clear about the edges:

• It does not edit text inside a picture. There is no "change £9.50 to £9.95" button, because the menu is artwork, not data.
• It does not connect to your till. If your POS prices change, the board does not know — you update the artwork.
• It does not do per-item pricing across sites automatically. Different prices mean different artwork, and therefore a menu per site.

How long it should take you

Once you have the new artwork, the whole job is a replace and a glance at the screens list — call it five minutes, whether you have one screen or twenty. The artwork itself is the only part that takes real time, and that was true of printed menus too.