Product Release Notes – September 2021

I’ve officially spotted ice cream, coffee and beer (yes, beer) in pumpkin form meaning that fall is right around the corner. As temperatures are dropping, so are MarginEdge software releases.

The high level:

• Pay an invoice across multiple payments with Partial Payments in Bill Pay
• Record internal transfers directly in the software
• Automatically generate a Menu Analysis 2×2 to enhance menu performance
• Improvements to notifications, updating products, and Commissary
• Export Credit Card payments to QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, and Sage Intacct
• …and more!

New MarginEdge Mobile App – We’re working on a brand new MarginEdge Mobile App with an improved invoice uploading experience and we’re in the market for some users to try it out! If you’re adventurous with new tech, have an iPhone, and interested in dedicating some time to help us improve, we’d love to talk to you about testing! Please reach out to us at mobiletesters@marginedge.com if you are interested in testing our new app.

As always, if you have any feedback or ideas to improve – we want to hear it! Just reply to me here or reach out to help@marginedge.com.

– Simon Krauss, Director of Product Management

Bill Pay

Partial Payments are here and putting a song in our ears*! Waiting for a credit to come in, paying a deposit, or splitting a large invoice out over a few payments? Bill Pay now supports paying partial amounts. We’ll keep track of your balance for you and mark it as fully paid once you’ve paid it all off.

This new functionality is currently available for all restaurants using QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online. Please reach out to simon@marginedge.com if you are interested in using Partial Payments with another accounting system.

Along with partial payments:

• We’ve added the ability to manage which people on your team receive Bill Pay Confirmation and Returned Check emails. On the new-and-improved Notifications screen (more information about this screen below!), you can easily configure which roles should be notified when a payment is scheduled or when a check is returned as undeliverable.
• Now you can pre-populate the memo lines with account numbers and invoice numbers to help your vendors see the relevant info on your payment.

* = I’ve been so excited for this feature to come out that I’ve been singing about it…here’s my jingle, to the tune of “Part of your World“ from The Little Mermaid.

Catchy, isn’t it?

Internal Transfers

Say goodbye to paper transfers sheets! You can now record your internal transfers directly in MarginEdge.

To initiate an internal transfer, all you need to do is pick the restaurant where the transfer is headed, select which products you want to transfer, and indicate the quantity. Your transfer will automatically be reflected on your reports and be ready to export to accounting.

If you have multiple restaurants within a concept, you’ll find the Transfers option under the Order header in the left sidebar.

If you’re not using this feature yet, but interested in transferring items from one restaurant location to another and keeping it straight in MarginEdge, we recommend you check out this new and improved way to account for your transfers!

This feature is available for restaurants that operate within the same concept. For more information, check out this help article Internal Transfers.

Menu Analysis 2×2

Introducing the Menu Analysis 2×2! To show you how each menu item is performing in terms contributions to profit, we’ve taken Menu Analysis data and placed each item on an easy-to-digest chart. By comparing item volume and profitability, you can quickly identify the “Stars” (purchased frequently with high unit profitability), the “Dogs” (purchased infrequently with low unit profitability), and those in between.

We recommend evaluating one or a few categories of your menu at a time to level-set profitability and volume expectations.

(Just a note that that we inherited these terms from the industry – we would never categorize a menu item as dog but renaming it the “Almost there little buddy” section seemed like a mouthful. 🙂)

Navigation: Recipes > Menu Items > Menu Analysis > View As: Chart

For more insights on what each quadrant means and what you can do about them for better menu performance, you can view our Menu Analysis 2×2 blog post.

Other exciting enhancements

• Updated Notification screen – We redesigned the Notification preferences screen to make it easier to use, particularly for users managing multiple restaurants. Each notification type is shown on its own to make it easier to see exactly what the settings are across restaurants. You can also now go into “Combined” view to update all locations at once.
• Bulk product updates – We’ve made it easier to update many products at once. On the Products > Products page you can now bulk update the Category and Tax Exempt status for a Product. Very soon we’ll add the ability to bulk add products to a count sheet or remove them from inventories.
• Commissary – You can now export high-level commissary order data from the Inbound Orders screen.
• Coming Soon: Deactivating Count Sheets – Soon you’ll be able to mark a Count Sheet as deactivated. All the completed counts will remain, but you won’t see deactivated count sheets as an option throughout MarginEdge, helping you keep things trim.

Accounting

QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, and Sage Intacct – Exporting Credit Card Paid Invoices

If you use QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online or Sage Intacct, you can now export invoices and mark them as paid by credit card. Invoices exported with a credit card payment account will report a credit card charge to the mapped vendor account. If you don’t want to create vendors for certain invoices paid with a credit card, you can still export the invoice without a vendor mapping and the vendor name will show up as a memo in your credit card register.

To learn more about our new credit card payments account support and how to get set up, check out the help article Setting Up Payment Accounts.

Peachtree – Memo Lines

We’ve added support for memo lines on sales lines exported to Peachtree accounting system. If you’d like to get memo lines, reach out to help@marginedge.com to help you get set up.

Restaurant365 – Image Links

On orders exported to Restaurant365, we now include an invoice link in the comment fields that takes you to the invoice in MarginEdge.

POS Integrations

New POS Integrations

• 365 Retail Markets
• Coming soon: Squirrel
• Coming soon: ChowNow – Please email support if you use ChowNow and would like to integrate the data into MarginEdge.

New Labor Integrations

• Focus Cloud
• Simphony
• Cake
• SmartTab
• Digital Dining

A note on Support September 22-24:

After over a year as a dispersed team, we are getting together for an all-hands retreat Wednesday, September 22 through Friday, September 24. We’ll be doing some team building events and planning for an exciting year ahead, but it may make our response times a little slower. Thank you in advance for your patience with us!