Changelog

Closing an order is final — it marks the order as Paid and locks its status for good, which keeps your sales history and loyalty rewards accurate. Since one stray click shouldn't lock an order forever, WhatsMenu now asks you to confirm before an order is closed, whether you close it from the order page or in bulk from the orders list. The confirmation also tells you when that click will award loyalty points to the customer, so there are no surprises. The same protection now applies everywhere, including the vendor app: a settled order can no longer be switched back to unpaid.

Editing your custom fields no longer changes what past orders show. Every order now keeps its own permanent copy of the questions it asked, so deleting a field, renaming one, or switching off item custom fields only affects orders from that point on — a "name to engrave" collected last month stays on that order, on its receipt and on the customer's tracking page, no matter how you reorganise your fields today. Checkout field responses are protected the same way, including in your orders report and exports, where a deleted field's column used to disappear along with its answers. Two smaller fixes come with it: orders placed while item custom fields were switched off no longer show empty rows, and a field you add today no longer appears as a blank question on orders that came in before it existed.

Open any app under Settings and you will find a short explanation at the top telling you what it does, what changes for your customers, and where to look once you switch it on. Sixty apps had nothing there before, so the only way to find out was to enable one and see what happened. Payment methods now say where to get your keys and whether orders are marked paid for you or you confirm each payment yourself, which is the difference between a gateway your customers pay through at checkout and a QR they pay after ordering. The explanations appear in the language your dashboard is set to.

The words you write for customers at checkout now follow the language they are browsing in. Your service labels (the Service options heading, and your names for Delivery, Pickup and Dine in), your checkout message, your success page message, the note on your date and time picker, your order message template, and the name and description of every payment method you offer all translate per language. Switch language using the selector at the top of your dashboard, type them in that language, and save; the other languages keep what they had, and a badge beside each field shows which one you are editing. The payment description is worth doing first if you take bank transfers — it is where your account details and instructions sit, and a customer who cannot read them cannot pay you. Nothing changes until you choose to translate: everything you have already written keeps showing to everyone exactly as it does today, and any language you have not filled in falls back to your default rather than going blank.

If you collect extra details on an item — a name to engrave, a preferred date, a note for the kitchen — you can now correct those answers from the order page. Each item's details block has an edit button; change what you need and save, and the correction flows through to the kitchen ticket, the receipt and the customer's tracking page. This works even after the order is paid, since these answers don't change the amount. Dropdown answers also now record the option you set up rather than a position number, so an order that used to read "Option: 0" now reads the actual choice.

POS talks to the cloud for every action, and it now says so plainly when it can't. A Wi-Fi icon sits in the top bar — muted when all is well, red and flashing the moment the register loses touch with your orders — alongside a red bar explaining that nothing can be saved right now, and a green one confirming when the connection returns. The bigger change is that nothing fails quietly any more: adding or removing an item, changing a quantity, applying a discount or saving the order will tell you if it didn't reach us, instead of leaving a screen that looks like it worked. A quantity that couldn't be saved reverts and explains why. If your venue has patchy Wi-Fi near the till, your staff will notice the difference immediately.

The Status Display screen — the read-only companion to your kitchen screen — now loads your live order queue properly and is ready to mount at the pass or host stand. It picks up the same improvements as the Kitchen Display: Active and Finished buttons with live counts, a clear message when a board is empty, and a warning if the screen loses its connection. Order cards are now colour-accented by service type so dine-in, pickup and delivery are easy to tell apart, the search box filters the board as you type, and an Account menu in the corner gets you back to your dashboard. If you tried this screen before and found it blank, it's worth another look.

The kitchen screen has had a proper going-over. Active and Finished are now two clearly lit buttons with live counts, so there's never any doubt which board you're looking at, and closed orders reliably land in Finished where you can reopen them. A new panel on the right adds up every outstanding item across all your tickets — if four tables ordered the same dish, you see one total instead of hunting across four cards. New orders flash green and can play a chime, so nobody has to stare at the screen to catch them. If the screen loses its connection it now says so plainly, keeps your last orders visible, and quietly catches up when the connection returns. Everything has been sized for fingers rather than a mouse, and under Settings you can set your own wait-time thresholds and colours so tickets turn orange and red on your kitchen's schedule, not ours.

Two fixes to how visitors search your catalogue. If your items are written with accented characters — Café, Móvel, Grüße — searching without the accent found nothing, and neither did searching with it in some cases. That now works both ways, so "cafe" and "Café" find the same things. Second, searching more than one word used to widen the results instead of narrowing them: "fried rice" returned everything containing "fried" plus everything containing "rice". Now every word has to match, so a longer search gets you closer rather than further away. Search also looks in more places — your category names, product codes, and the names of your option groups and add-ons — so a visitor searching for a size, a variant or an add-on will find the items that offer it.

We went through every part of WhatsMenu that depends on the clock and made sure it all runs on your store's time zone, precisely. Coupons now work through the whole of their last day, and happy-hour windows and day-of-week rules kick in at your local time. Scheduled promotions — carousel slides, announcements, popups and promo cards — go live and expire at exactly the time you set. Daily order limits count orders against the day the customer scheduled them for, menus that change by time of day switch over on your clock, and the order status page shows customers times in your local time. If you spot a date or time anywhere that looks off, it should be a thing of the past.

Leaving the WhatsApp number blank in Settings → Messaging now switches WhatsApp off properly: enquiry buttons, order sharing and new order alerts all stop with it, so nothing is sent to a number you no longer use. If you had previously entered 000000000 to disable it, that still counts as off and you don't need to change anything.

Stock is counted per combination, so a combination only has a stock figure once it exists. If your item creates combinations on demand, there's nothing to count against — and until now the setting could be switched on anyway, which looked like stock was being tracked when it wasn't. Turning it on in that situation is no longer possible, and any item already set up that way now shows a note on its edit page with a link to create the combinations. Once they exist, each one carries its own stock, price and photo.

Pinning a pickup location just got easier — when adding or editing a pickup area, type the address or place name in the new search box above the map and the pin jumps straight there. No more scrolling and zooming to find your street. Clicking the map, dragging the pin, and the Use current location button all still work as before.

Your customers' booking form got a polish. Party size is now a row of tappable buttons (1–6, plus "7+" for larger groups) instead of a dropdown — quicker on a phone. When a service is performed by specific staff, the service and staff pickers sit side by side, and the form asks for an email only when that's the only way you've set up to reach customers (if you notify by WhatsApp, email stays optional). Emails are also checked for typos and throwaway addresses as they're entered, so confirmations actually land.

Two team upgrades on the Reservations panel. A new team member filter shows just one person's bookings across every tab — one click to see Ana's whole day, or everything still unassigned. And the confirm dialog now includes a staff picker, so you can hand a booking to a different person (or assign one that came in without) right as you confirm it. WhatsMenu checks their calendar first and warns you if they already have a booking or time off at that moment, so a reassignment can never create a double-booking.

Reservations grew a lot of settings lately, so they now have a proper home. Open More → Settings at the top of the Reservations panel for a dedicated settings page with everything grouped by topic — storefront booking, time slots, notifications, customer self-service, and no-shows — instead of one long list. Services moved out of the sidebar too: you'll find it in the same More menu. And where a notification costs credits (like the WhatsApp alert when a new booking arrives), the setting now says so upfront.

Building your catalog from photos just got easier to navigate. The Add items with AI chooser now shows at a glance which option fits what you have — one photo per product, or one photo of a whole menu or price list that AI reads all at once. The flow is much smoother on a phone, too: the choices are easier to tap, photo uploads are more reliable, and you'll now see live progress while each photo is processed instead of wondering if anything happened. Requires the AI Kit app.

Bookings where the customer never showed up now have a proper home. Mark a booking as no-show with one tap on its card (and restore it just as easily if they walk in late), or set a grace period in Settings → Apps → Reservations and let WhatsMenu flag missed bookings automatically. It adds up: customers with 3 or more no-shows in the last 90 days get a warning badge on their future requests, so you know exactly who you're confirming before you hold a slot for them.

Driver location tracking now keeps running while the driver navigates in Google Maps or Waze — previously the map could go quiet the moment they switched apps. Your order-page and dashboard maps stay live for the whole trip. New order assignments also arrive with a longer, louder alert tone, and tapping the notification takes the driver straight to the order.

Adding a delivery address from the account area just got easier for your customers. As they type, matching addresses appear as suggestions — they pick the right one and a map drops in with a pin they can nudge to the exact spot. The postal code and country fill in on their own, and there's room to add the block or apartment, floor, entry, and intercom so your driver can find the door on the first try. It's the same address experience customers already get at checkout, now available anytime from their saved addresses — which means cleaner, more complete addresses and fewer missed deliveries for you.