How do I "86" an item from the menu?

[alldaymia]

For a restaurant/cafe, when the kitchen/bar is temporarily out of or unable to make an item, typically front of house is told the item is "86'ed", meaning no longer able to be served. Is there a way to mark the item as unavailable on the POS without having to delete it, which is clearly impracticle?

[ThierrLRC]

Hi

Are you using the different pages on the square register or do you enter the item through the library?

It is very easy to remove an item from one of the pages without deleting it. Just keep your finger on the item to enter the editing mode, then you can remove that item from that page - but it will still be in your library -. Remember to exit the editing mode when done, there is a button for that.

Hope this helps.

At my café, we do it the old fashion way by posting a note by the register but obviously that doesn't work for every situation.

Thierry

[EJ_]

@ThierrLRC Great response! 

@alldaymia using the Items Grid page will allow you to add items to sales easily, and also enable you to remove them from the Items Grid once you sell out of an item for the day. 

Check out this article about the Items Grid.

[alldaymia]

EJ, thank you for taking the time to reply. However, my question was on how to disable an item, preventing it from being purchased, without having to delete it. I am looking for a way to keep the item on my register, but disable it so everyone in the store can see that it is not available for purchase. In a Food & Beverage business, items are constantly going out of stock for the day. It is not convenient to have to delete items and re-create them every day.

If I were to fully delete the item one day, that would mean I would have to re-create it the next day, when it was back in stock. Also, if I am using an inventory tracking system, and each sales item is linked to an inventory item, then deleting the sales item would throw off the entire inventory relating to that item.

[EJ_]

@alldaymia Allow me to clarify a bit.

The Items Grid is a section that you can add your favorite or most popular items to so that yourself, and your employees, do not have to navigate to the entire items library to find them. There isn't a way to absolutely disable an item for the day, but using the Items Grid would remove it from the main screen that your employees would be using for sales. 

Deleting an item from the Item Grid does not permanently delete the item from your Item Library, but rather removes from this "Quick Screen" that your employees would use at the register. 

So you would not be Creating and Deleting items each day, but rather adding and removing items that are sold out from the Items Grid. 

[HRB]

@EJ_and @alldaymia

I am so glad to see this post. SAD there is no real solution. It's honestly too much to ask a Cashier to essentially reprogram the system every day by removing items from the grid. This leaves so much room for error and for messing up the item grid for others coming on shift.

I also need to put a strong request in for a time limit on specials. For instance, in our old restaurant POS (2Touch) there was a way to set up our daily special that only ran from 11 am to 6pm so that at 6pm a big red circle with a line through it would pop up over the item and the system would simply not allow the Cashier to select and sell that item. This was extremely helpful for forgetful employees or employees that would otherwise stretch the rules for customers and allow them to get the special after 6 pm. Now I have to rely on employees just remembering and checking the time to tell customers they can no longer order these time limit specials (we have several specials throughout the week so this is getting really annoying). Square gets a big F in my book for this. I could imagine this would be helpful for other retail businesses as well and not super difficult to program into the current system. PLEASE ADD THIS ASAP! Thanks!

[Spenser]

Thanks for sharing, @HRB. We're not currently developing features to accommodate this, but I appreciate the examples. We'll share your feedback with the appropriate team at Square and I'll happily update this thread, should we add these features in the future. Thanks again. 

[MattBrew]

Just chiming in here that it's very surprising that you're not developing this feature. It's standard on almost all of your competitors in the restaurant/cafe space. I agree with everyone above that this needs to be implemented without requiring the staff to edit and re-edit the grid every day, which even then doesn't actually prevent the item from being sold. 

[dnolan]

Yes this would be a great feature for us also. We stopped using online ordering, because there is no way to 86 an item. So we would have to call online orders back and tell them what they ordered was sold out. We are a food truck located outside of a brewery and letting customers order from inside the brewery on thier phones using the online store was a nice touch, but it became too combersome when we started running out of items. 

[Valentina]

As long as you are tracking inventory for the item, you should see the same inventory levels in your Square Item Library - subsequently your Point of Sale app - and on the Square Online side.

Are your items showing different inventory levels in those areas, @dnolan?

Or are you saying that you would like to see some type of visual Out of Stock messaging on your Point of Sale when you have sold all of an item, are tracking inventory, and adding that item to a sale using your Point of Sale?

[AStarDanced]

At Point of Sale, an item that reaches 0 in tracked inventory should not be able to be sold— AT ALL. It needs to be grayed out, or a pop-up, banner, indicator, or other notice directly ON that item AT the point of sale, AND prevent that item from being tallied into a customer’s transaction. 

my employees will accidentally process sales for items that have reached zero, so when I am finally able to look at the inventory listings the next day, there are NEGATIVE NUMBERS. This shouldn’t be a thing. It shouldn’t happen. I don’t understand why it happens at all. I truly don’t understand why Square has continued to allow it to happen.

[AStarDanced]

This is a serious problem for my (retail) business as well.  I have variations on items set up, and when one variation sells out (via stock tracking) it needs to unavailable to ring-up at Point of Sale.  Sending the stock tracking into negative numbers (e.g., an employee accidentally "sells" an item that no longer exists in the inventory) causes a problem for stock tracking AND for accounting.

PLEASE consider improving this aspect of stock/inventory tracking!

[Helen]

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback @AStarDanced. I don't have an update on this for you at this time but I will share your experience with our Product Team. It certainly sounds like there is room for improvement here and I'm sorry for the trouble it is causing in the meantime. 

@dnolan If you are interested in using the Online Store it is possible to hide an item, however, this does involve manually updating items from the Dashboard so I appreciate this might not be suitable for your food truck. 

[smallakin]

I'd like to second (or 3rd or 4th)  the request for something to be unable to be rung up when the item is at 0 in inventory.  We make many of our items to order even though we are a clothing business and some of the items inventory is set according to blank tees or yarn, etc.  My staff assumes that if it is available to be rung up, we have the materials to make it, because there is no alert or way of seeing that it's actually just putting the stock into negative numbers.

[STarugu]

My restaurant's (Catering @& TakeOut / WebOrders ) Menu is dynamic and the menu changes everyday, every week. Tomorros menu is diffrent from Todays( this Mondays menu is different than last Mondays menu) . Food made fresh from scratch daily. So some of the popular items run out well ahead of closing of the restaurant. Technically our menu changes every couple of hours thruout the day. We don't want to remove the Item entirely from Sales Screens / Monitors / Webnsites / social media which sends wrong signal to customer that we wont carry that Item. We like to rather display an Item with unavailable to order. Customers should see Item but should be greyed out to Order. Likewise new items would be able to add to the menu for particular time of the day(ex. Snacks 4-7PM). How could I make use of Square POS effectively with minimum effort ?.

Thanks.

[Woodironeatery]

We have been trying to get our online ordering up and running since the beginning of the year. However, I am still looking for an easy way for a server to 86  a menu item easily where people can no longer purchase it online that day. I see this thread started a very long time ago - please tell me there is an easy way to do this by this point!! Otherwise, am I correct that the only way to do it is for someone to log into square and navigate through a bunch of steps to get to the item page and mark it as unavailable?  Seems like a lot of steps to navigate for someone when they are in the weeds. Please help!! 

[AshleyK]

Hey @Wooduroneatery! Unfortunately, your assumptions are correct. Right now, the online store and Square for Restaurants do not sync, so if you 86 an item in Restaurants Point of Sale, you will have to also manually mark that item as unavailable in the online store.  But, if you have the regular app the item will be show as "out of stock" in the online store automatically when the item's inventory reaches 0. 

[romo209]

I work as a cashier in a food service operation associated with a winery and this is the first time I've used the Square Register and for the most part I like the system.

The one thing I would really like to see is a way of 86ing an item that is sold out for the day. This happens nearly every shift and it's very easy for me to accidentally sell something that is out of stock and post-it notes are so old fashioned and hardly foolproof. 

So I'd like to have a way of marking an item with a big red X with a circle and have this disable the add button for that item.

[kellyj]

@romo209

We definitely hear this request and know it would be an amazing feature to help the product fit the needs of Restaurants and Retail businesses alike.  

It is an option to remove items from the Grid View if it's not available at the time. That removes the option for a quick check out, but does not remove it from your library. A lot of similar businesses use this as a workaround while we look into this Feature Request.

This may help a bit for now Items Grid.

[CourtneyF]

I'm setting up my online store for our pick-up orders but we only offer Breakfast til 11am each day. So far anyone can order the breakfast items all day. Is there a setting for this yet and I'm just missing it?

[Valentina]

You're not missing anything in your settings, @CourtneyF!

This is a feature that has been requested by other sellers and is not currently available. I've moved your post to this thread as we are currently tracking this feature request here, and I want to make sure our product team sees your example. At this time, the best way to accomplish this would be to manually edit your items to be Unavailable after 11 AM.