A menu written for a printed card is not a menu a system can price. The gap between the two is where wrong prices, missing options and awkward phone calls come from. Closing it takes an afternoon.
Structure before content
Every item needs four things before anything else: a name a customer would actually say, a category, a price, and whether it is currently available. If an item cannot be given all four, it is not one item — it is several.
"Curry" at three prices depending on protein is three items, not one. Splitting them is tedious and it is the single change that most improves how a system handles the phone.
Name items the way customers say them
Customers do not ask for "Signature House Katsu Selection (Chicken)". They ask for chicken katsu. Names should match spoken language, with the flourish left for the printed menu.
Decide what is an option and what is an item
- Changes the price: usually its own item or a priced option.
- Changes the kitchen's work but not the price: an option or a note.
- Changes nothing: leave it out of the structure entirely and let it live in the notes field.
Prepare the file
A spreadsheet with one row per item and columns for name, category, price and availability will import into almost anything. Sort by category, check the prices against your current printed menu line by line, and fix the ones that have quietly drifted. There are usually more than you expect.
Review before you commit
Any import worth using shows you a preview of what will be created before it creates it. Read that preview properly. It is far cheaper than finding an error through a customer.
The maintenance habits that matter
- Mark items unavailable the moment you run out, not at the end of service. If your system reads availability live, this is what stops it offering things you cannot make.
- Change prices in one place only. The moment there are two copies of your price list, one of them is wrong.
- Review the whole catalog when you change your printed menu, not a fortnight later.
- Give one person ownership. Shared responsibility for a price list means nobody checks it.
The prize for getting this right is not tidiness. It is that everything downstream — the phone, the website, the ordering page — can quote a price you can stand behind.