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Define authority field by field

An item name is not a durable identifier. Two stores can both sell a house burger with different prices, tax treatment or allowed modifiers. Keep the source item ID, location, version or update time and destination mapping. A menu published without valid modifier groups can look correct to a guest while producing an unusable ticket.

Your POS may own price and taxes while a separate ordering system owns photos or display descriptions. That is workable if the boundary is explicit. It is risky when two systems can independently overwrite the same price. Identify who can edit each field and which change wins.

Test an 86 event from start to finish

  • Make one synthetic or approved test item unavailable at the authority.
  • Record the change time and confirm which downstream channels received it.
  • Attempt a new order through each channel after the expected propagation window.
  • Inspect a previously started basket or conversation to see how stale availability is handled.
  • Restore the item and verify recovery, including any cache or manual override.

Do not treat one successful update as proof of permanent freshness. Ask how failures are detected, what the retry policy is and whether staff can see the latest successfully applied menu version. A clear stale-menu response is safer than an unqualified availability promise.

Price and modifier rules travel together

Test required choices, maximum selections, free versus paid substitutions and nested modifiers as one bundle. A channel that accepts a modifier name without its price can undercharge. A destination that receives free text instead of a structured option may route the order but lose the kitchen meaning.

Include mid-service price changes and location-specific items in your test set. Compare the guest-facing total with the accepted order, tax and fee lines and receipt. Do not assume two channels should have equal prices if the restaurant deliberately uses channel-specific pricing; document the policy and ensure each channel applies its own approved schedule.

Keep a change log staff can use

Store the request, approver, intended locations, effective time and verification result for material changes. A shift lead should be able to answer whether a special is actually live, not just whether someone clicked publish. If an emergency override exists, give it an expiry and a named owner.

In the validator, a menu mismatch is an instruction to document a mapping or an explicit exception. The tool does not inspect your real menu. Evidence must come from a live or provider-approved test environment.

A menu-change test you can repeat

Use a synthetic item with one required choice and one paid add-on. Update the approved price, mark the add-on unavailable, then test a fresh order and a conversation started before the update. The expected outcome must follow your documented stale-menu rule, with no unsupported item or price promise.

For the phone path, ask how the behavior described in Loman’s Square integration or Clover integration applies to your menu configuration. Record the observed update delay rather than assuming an instant sync.