Publishing is the easy part. The week after is where a QR menu either becomes something your team uses without thinking, or a card on the table nobody updates. Here is what to do with each of those days.

Night one: build the sold-out habit

The single thing that decides whether guests trust the menu is whether it tells the truth about what is left. A guest who orders the lamb and is told it ran out two hours ago will not open the menu again.

So on the first night, put the sold-out switch in someone’s hands. It is one tap on the phone, it needs no approval, and it takes effect before the next table scans. Whoever calls out "86 the lamb" is the person who should be tapping it.

Night two: check your own hours

Opening hours drive more than the line on your menu. They set the chart on your home screen, and if you only take orders during service, they decide when the table can send one at all. A kitchen that runs past midnight needs its closing time to say so, or the last two hours of every night land outside the window.

Day three: read the approval clock

Every order carries the seconds between a guest pressing send and someone accepting it. That number is the guest sitting there watching a screen, and it is the one service number worth arguing about at a staff meeting.

• Under a minute: nobody notices the difference from a waiter walking over.
• Two or three minutes: the table starts looking around for someone.
• Longer than that: set your own limits in Settings so the board turns amber and then red before the guest does.

Day five: look at what actually sold

By the fifth night there is enough on the board to read. Two things are usually waiting there: a dish that sells constantly and is priced as if it does not, and a dish that has taken up a line on the menu for a year without being ordered.

Neither needs a spreadsheet. The menu performance chart puts every dish against how often it sold and what it brought in, and the four corners of that chart are your next menu meeting.

Day seven: ask the floor what guests asked them

Whatever guests ask a server twice is missing from the menu. Usually it is one of three things: what comes with it, how spicy it is, or whether it can be made without something. All three are a line of description or a tag, and both take a minute to add.

A menu that changed this week is a menu people read. One that has not changed since it was published is a picture of a menu.