Advice for best way to configure for a wine bar with a retail wine shop

[ChrisW]

We have what feels like a complex setup that's proving challenging to operate and maintain good data. We operate a wine and cheese bar, and also have a retail section at the front with bottles to go, cheese, and other packaged food items.

On the restaurant side, we'll sell wine by the glass or bottle, and sell the same bottles on the retail side at a discount for "to go." Some of the problems we're running into:

• We have tables who will be dining in, then want to order a bottle to go. This results in that bottle being printed at the bar prep station and the server having to run and grab that ticket so someone doesn't serve it as dine in.
• This has that retail revenue being booked as dine-in, and throwing off our $/check and $/guest metrics.
• It also requires us to apply a "TOGO" discount against all of the retail wine, and it's easy for a server to miss this by mistake.

Does anyone operate a similar concept, and is there a way we should be setting this up for smoother operations and better reporting? Thank you!

[rcmck]

Not sure how you have your wine menu setup, but if it is already one of your top level menus (not a subgroup of another menu) you would probably be better off making a copy of your dine in menu for takeout/retail, convert it to menu specific pricing so that you can set a lower price for the same bottles. This will avoid the need to discount, you can set the prep station for that menu to noprint to stop anything ordered from that menu from going to bar prep station.

Revenue center would have to be assigned to a device that you use for takeout/retail, not much you could do to get the takeout wine on a dine-in check to report correctly other than putting it on a separate check entirely  and changing the dining option.

Article on menu specific pricing and converting menus https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Building-Happy-Hour-Menus-w-Menu-Specific-Pricing-14930044457... 

https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Creating-and-Assigning-Revenue-Centers 

[ChrisW]

Thanks for the insight, I'll have a look at this! I feel like this would make inventory challenging though, as it would be kept differently for retail vs dine-in?

[rcmck]

It shouldn't be a problem, the items themselves will be exactly the same, they will just exist on two menus with a different price depending on the menu they are on. You wouldn't be making copies of the items, just the menu/menu groups.

[ChrisW]

Brilliant, I'll give this a try – thank you!