The 3 Dots on the Log In Screen are an attractive nuisance

[LoydT]

On our First Day with Toast we could not find a closed check. After searching and calling Toast support, we found out that a server had pressed "Clear Closed Orders" which is a choice that can be reached by pressing on the 3 dots in the upper corner of the login screen. Please note that no one has to be logged in or have any permissions to be able to do this. Toast Support showed us how to find the closed check and reopen it.

Right under that option is LOGOUT. Servers think that means log off the screen. Nope, that closes the Toast app and goes back to be Android screen. Someone with an email and password for the Toast app has to log in. I learned on a Toast Classroom live session that it is a good practice to create a "dummy" user for just that singular purpose, a user that has no other permissions. Good to know.

Also on that 3-dot menu is RESYNC ALL ORDERS. This function was not fully explained to us. On the second day we experienced a four hour Toast service disruption due to Amazon Web Services. We were told NOT to press that option. I find it more than a little concerning that there is a button that we are not supposed to press that can be pressed by anyone, customers or staff, without a login or password.

Surely there is a more elegant and safer way to do this?!

Loyd

[josh212 · Accepted solution]

Ok Let me break theh functionalities down for you, and let me tell u if you think that is a nuisance wait until you deal with the notification bell on the back button with no way to move it, (it is in the process of being reconfigured). The POS Devices are just tablets, therefore just as your phone or tablet offoads unecessary data from the paging file(files that are ncecessary to be opened on demand), Toast does the same throughout the day. Clearing closed orders only clears orders that have been paid, and closed with a tip adjustment and marked fulfulled, deliveried or picked up. This feature is available because if you are searching for orders you may not need to see the mornngs orders, especially in higher-volume setting the tablets would lag and be significantly slower if trying to index a full days of orders, which is why the cloud based servers are the fastest lookup tool.

Now I am unsure how you set-up your employees. However, I have all my employees set up a log-in. Any employee can use their login to sign into the Toast POS app, all that thisi does is log that device into the current restaurant, the passcode that is still required on the home screen to do anything. 

Now you may ask why is this on the home screen, well when your POS is freezing etc or having issues, these are the two steps besides learing the cache on the android settings menu to get the POS running again. (almost like clicking ctrl+alt+del and closing the 60 programs open on your desktop etc.), so you want these tools available when nothing else is syncing properly. 

Now for the last part is the offline-mode. This is a relatively new feature and is not fully rolled out. What happens with this is When your devices all enter offlne mode (only when a full system/store outage is in effect), One Device temporarliy becomes the hub "cloud" for all transactions and creates an internal network in order to keep operations running smoothly and allowing devices to communicate with eachother, as they cannot reach the data centers during this period. Without this you would only have access to the check on the device the order was created on. When your location recovers from offline mode it takes every version of the check (every change that was made and entry, on al the devices and merges them together. Resyncing willl clear these checks and put them in a Read Check phase, when the device has a version of the check but cannnot find the other versions and cannot close out. Which may cause reporting errors as syncing all data syncs with the cloud which is not accessible. Depending on how reliant your business is on external orders etc, I Reccoment having a cellular backup solution between your ISP and your phones and then meraki to avoid most outages that cann occur when your internet goes down, obivously this wont help a Global AWS outage, but should allow you to avoid any local factors that would potentially place you in offline mode. The way we have it set up is ISP to Cellular Failover Device (basically the same aas making your phone be a hotspot), which is tthen connected to our phone switch, which then has a port provisined for the Toast meraki.  This wont allow for your non-toast wifi to run but will allow all your devices to stay online and to continue to recieve online orders when your ISP (cable company), has an outage. Because it is only data I think the most we have ever used is 1 gig in a month and that is because our cable company was out in our shopping center for five days. Don't worry your kitchen will not be able to steam a soccer game through this connection. 

In Summary, this overflow meni allows for basic reset options similar to closing and restarrting a program or logging off and restarting your computer in a much faster capacity so they are necessary, and cannnot really cause any errors.

[LoydT]

Hello Josh!

First off, thanks for taking the time to write such an excellent response! It is a great stress relief.

Second, are you available for free-lance Toast training and support? Notice there is no "lol" here.

I assume this reply is going to you in response  to your answer, which I accepted as a solution. We use the word "assume" a lot in our relationship with Toast, because despite watching hours of on-demand videos, attending Office Live classes, watching live classes, reading articles in Toast Classroom and Toast Platform Guide, having a Toast installer spend over 20 hours with us (we already had all the hardware installed and network up and running), talking to Toast phone support,  and having CIO with 20 years of experiences on ALOHA POS who is quite good, we still find ourselves having to figure things out the hard way, and our assumptions are shattered.

The 3 dots is a good case in point. Opening Toast Go Live day a bartender cleared all the open checks without telling us, and probably not even knowing she did it. Then she wanted to reopen the closed check, for reasons I have forgotten. We spent 30 minutes trying to find the closed check with all the managers on the POS terminals to no avail. We called support. They told us how to reopen a closed check. Under REPORTS. Not the most intuitive spot. We had never read or seen anything about those 3 dots anywhere in all of the Toast resources we availed ourselves of. It reminds me of this quote from Henry David Thoreau in Walden - 

"Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about."

I can understand the need to purge closed checks to speed up the terminal. I can understand how it would be faster to look up the closed check in the cloud. It is not faster for the manager to go into the office, fire up the computer, login into Toast Web, and find the closed check, compared to finding it on the terminal. Since the check we were trying to find was the second Toast check we had ever rung up in our system, the idea of purging never crossed our mind, until Toast support said that at 800 closed checks the system would auto purge.

As I told my CIO I did not think Toast would put something behind the 3 dots that could harm us. Now that we know how Toast operates, and reading your explanation, we are good to go with that one. The problem is that there is one after another of those "learning experiences".  This is probably due to the curse of knowledge where someone knows so much about something they assume (wrongly) that the other person must know what they know. Nope. We are learning Toast the hard way.

That said, if all my community posts gets answered so quickly and with such insight, I feel much better. Too bad Toast won't compensate you for doing their work. lol

We did not setup our employees with their own Toast POS app login. I assume that is different from their Toast payroll login. If not, giving them a login sounds like a good idea, if it is not their payroll login, which based on this snippet from Toast Central, "The Google of Toast" (perhaps the most grandiose use of Google ever lol)--

"Note: Each employee can obtain a login using their own email address and create their own password. Any employee with a username can log into Toast, but User Access Permissions determine what aspects of the system users are able to access."

Again, a handy hint, which never registered during our Toast learning experience, and was never mentioned by the installer in over 20 hours.

As for the terminal unfreezing benefit of syncing the data, on day one we had not experienced a terminal freeze yet, and still have not to my knowledge. We had two terminal card readers lose communication but a reboot resolved those. I have not heard reports of if that is still happening. Toast support is trying to find out why a couple of orders a day of a 1/4# cheeseburger with fries the fries do not print on the fryer prep station. They escalated this because the first level support tech had no idea. All we have heard is that maybe we made a lot of published changes and the data needed to be recycled. As I understand it the resync just resyncs the individual terminal, and not the entire system so I would assume a resync would need to be done on every terminal and handheld, if that indeed was the fix. Now I can see why the resync option is so freely available.

Our CIO has two internet feeds from two different vendors going to each restaurant. They are both hot all the time and in the event one goes down the other keeps servicing our internet needs. He employs subnets and ports and other mystical network stuff to firewall the various network needs. On day two of going live the AWA outage occurred. Offline mode worked very well. This is one where we actually had prior knowledge of what to do. We were told that each server would need to ring up orders on ONE terminal or handheld and use that while in offline mode. We told everyone about this, but some failed to grasp the concept. They used one handheld, racked it, and then used another one the next time! Thankfully I don't think anything too bad happened during the four hour outage.

So, in summary, in your expert opinion nothing in that 3-dot menu can really do us any harm. I figured Toast had their reasons to make it so freely available. That is very comforting to know. We have been training our managers to avoid them like the plague.

If you have read this far I have a list of other questions I would love a solution to. I assume (that word again) the best plan is to post them on this community forum and maybe you can weigh in again.

Very thankfully yours,

Loyd

[Rob]

Your feedback is much appreciated. Our community was created to identify gaps and improve our content and educational resources. Furthermore, we are developing a system to reward those who provide guidance and support on these forums. We want to provide a platform for individuals to share their experiences and for restaurateurs to offer the best practices that they have found with Toast. Thanks for your input as we continue to work to enhance the educational and user experience!