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Archiving POS menu items

Some things you sell for one week. A summer granita, a Christmas panettone, a guest chef’s special. When the run is over you want them gone from the cashier screen — but you don’t want to lose what they earned. Archiving does exactly that: it tucks an item away while keeping every sale it ever rang up.

What it does

Your POS menu items are tied to your history. Every time one is sold, that sale is recorded against it, and it deducts from your pantry stock. Those records are what your sales reports, your best-seller lists and your stock counts are built on. So an item can never be truly deleted — pull it out and you’d tear a hole in your own numbers.

But a menu list full of things you stopped selling is noise. The cashier has to scroll past last winter’s specials to find today’s dishes. So instead of deleting, you archive. An archived item disappears from the cashier screen completely — staff can’t ring it up by accident — and it drops out of your everyday menu list. Everything it ever sold stays in your reports, exactly as it was.

When the dish comes back next season, you restore it in one click. Its price, its sizes, its modifiers, its link to the pantry — all of it returns untouched. You’re not rebuilding the item; you’re just taking it off the shelf and putting it back later.

The rule

Don’t delete a menu item you’ve ever sold — archive it. Deleting would erase its history; archiving keeps the history and just hides the item.

How to use it

Open the POS menu and stay on the Items tab. Along the top toolbar, next to the search box, you’ll find an Active / Archived switch. It opens on Active — your live menu, the same list you always see.

To put an item away, find its row and click Archive on the right, just before the Edit button. The item vanishes from the list straight away and is immediately gone from every cashier screen in the venue. That’s it — no confirmation dialogs, no forms.

To see what you’ve archived, flip the toolbar switch to Archived. The list now shows only your put-away items, each with a grey Archived tag. The little number on the switch tells you how many are waiting there. To bring one back, click the green Restore button on its row; it returns to the live menu and the cashier screen instantly.

While an item is archived its Available toggle is replaced by a dash — “available or sold out” doesn’t mean anything for something that isn’t on the menu at all. The moment you restore it, the toggle comes back.

One thing worth knowing: archiving an item removes it from the cashier, but it does not by itself hide a dish from your online menu. The online menu is controlled separately on the menu item’s own page. If a dish lived in both places, archive the till item and hide the online one.

Worked example

Marco runs a trattoria and put a Negroni Sbagliato on the bar list for a two-week aperitivo promotion. He priced it at ฿180, linked it to his Prosecco and Campari stock, and sold forty of them.

The promotion ends on a Sunday night. On Monday Marco opens the POS menu, finds Negroni Sbagliato in the Cocktails section, and clicks Archive. The drink disappears from the bar staff’s cashier screen — no one can ring it up by mistake on Tuesday — and it drops off his menu list. But when he opens his sales report for the promotion, all forty Sbagliatos are still there, ฿7,200 of takings, counted exactly as before. His Campari stock still shows the forty measures it poured.

Three months later he wants to run the promotion again. Marco flips the Items toolbar to Archived, sees Negroni Sbagliato sitting there with its grey tag, and clicks Restore. The cocktail is back on the bar screen at ฿180, still linked to the Campari, ready to pour — and now the new sales stack on top of the old forty in his reports.

  • The cashier screen — where archived items vanish from the moment you archive them.
  • Editing a menu item — the item’s full detail page, untouched by archiving and restored intact.
  • Online vs in-venue — why hiding from the online menu is a separate switch from archiving on the till.