Product Release Notes – March 2021

Can’t believe spring is right around the corner! While you’ve been getting your restaurant ready for what hopefully proves to be our comeback season (fingers crossed), we’ve been adding new functionality all over the software.

Disclaimer, we cover a lot of ground in this edition of release notes – so here’s a menu to help you find what you’re looking for:

• New POS integrations for Labor Expense Management
• Lots of improvements to invoice approval
• New Bill Pay setup and functionality
• Export prep and pack lists for your Commissary Kitchen
• Compare product prices across units
• Options for configuring credits and tax exemptions in Accounting
• Improvements to Menu Analysis, including more visibility into calculations and an average profit calculation
• Get a sneak peak of what’s coming next!

Just a reminder that we’re always interested in hearing your feedback or ideas to improve! Just reply to me here or reach out to help@marginedge.com.

– Simon Krauss, Director of Product Management

Labor Expense Management

Are you tracking labor expenses in MarginEdge yet? If you use one of these POS’s and want to start using Labor Expense Management, please contact help@marginedge.com. Everyone’s been loving it, hope you do too!

• TouchBistro (new)
• Adelo Express (new)
• Aloha (new)
• Brink (new)
• NCRSilver (new)
• Toast
• Revel
• Upserve
• MobileBytes

Labor Integrations Coming Soon:

• Micros
• Focus Cloud
• Digital Dining

Invoice Approval

We’ve made several improvements to our invoice approval functionality to give you more flexibility on which invoices to approve, find what you’re looking for, and make changes to your invoices more efficiently.

Looking to get started with invoice approvals? You can learn more get started with invoice approvals.

• We now highlight new vendor items and products and give you the ability to filter new items so you can focus on what needs to be confirmed.
• Right from the invoice approval page, users can make edits to the Product, for example changing the Category assignment or changing the Product a Vendor Item is assigned to.
• Users with the Accountant role in MarginEdge have permission to make changes to an Invoice Number, Customer Number, or Date right from the invoice approval screen.
• Now, accountant users can make changes to the payment account on the approval screen – they no longer need to write our help desk. Restaurant Admin users can view the payment account but not make changes.
• If you want to approve invoices by vendors – now you can! Just like you’re able to select specific categories, now you can select specific vendors, or select all of them and “de-select” some.
• Approve invoices faster! Instead of going into each invoice to approve them, select invoices from the invoice approval home screen and hit approve.

Example of approving invoices by vendor:

Bill Pay Set-up

• Granting Payment Approval Permissions – Previously, restaurants using the Payment Approver functionality would need to submit a help ticket to add another user as a Payment Approver. Now, any Payment Approver can grant this role to an existing user.

Here’s a help article on how you can turn this feature on.

• Visibility into Bank Accounts – For users with multiple bank accounts, we’ve added the account information on the Payment Detail pop-up to easily identify which account the payment came from.
• Vendor Addresses – A new setting allows you to only pull vendor addresses from your accounting system; we won’t use the addresses on invoices. Tell us your source-of-truth from the start and we’ll follow!
• Confirmation Emails – We’ll send the user who paid an invoice an email confirming that the payment has been initiated. This way, the user can forward the email to stake-holders letting them knowing a payment is on the way.
• Bulk Setup – To eliminate lots of clicks into menus and saving, you can now select multiple vendors at once to determine if you’d like to pay them with Bill Pay.

Commissary Kitchens

• Prep List Export and Pack List Export – We have new exports to help commissaries figure out what needs to be prepared and packed across multiple orders. The Prep List Export allows you to select multiple orders and download a file that tells you how much of each product and recipe you need to prepare for the selected orders. Then, the Pack List Export allows you to select all orders you are preparing to ship and download a file that will tell you exactly what products and recipes need to be packed and where they need to go.

Example of a Prep List in CSV format:

Other Improvements:

• You can now change the invoice date for a commissary order to reflect the date the order was sent out of the commissary.
• In addition to Admin users, users with the Manager role can now edit, review, and close inbound orders in the commissary.

Products

• Company Product Export – To compare product prices across units, you used to need to export price lists individually from each restaurant. Now through the Company Product Export option on the Products screen, you can export data for all restaurants at once to do a comparison

Accounting

• Default Tax-Exempt Option – Instead of going through product by product and marking them as tax-exempt, now, you can set a default Tax Exempt status by accounting category so that as products are created, they have the intended tax-exempt status.
• Negative Bills Option (Intacct) – For clients using Intacct, we have a new option for exporting invoices and credits over to accounting. Now, you can see invoices and credits separately in Intacct, instead of having the credit automatically adjusting the value of the invoice. Accountants wanting more visibility into all the credits coming in – this one’s for you! If you prefer to see invoices and credits separately, just indicate in your Intacct settings that would like to “Send credits as negative bills instead of AP Adjustments.”
• Accounting Export Page – We’ve also made some usability improvements to the Accounting Export page. We’re reorganized the buttons to make the primary actions clearer and we’ve added the ability to export data as a CSV.

Menu Analysis

There’s a lot going on in these numbers so we’ve added some data to help you understand where these numbers are coming from.

• We added a new column that tells you your average profit per menu item (including modifier costs).
• A brand new Details column allows you to drill into each menu item and see exactly how we arrived at these calculations using your PMIX data.
• More granularity on amounts – We’ve broken out revenue and costs into menu items and modifiers.
  Menu Analysis

Coming Soon

• Multiple POS Integrations – Support for connecting multiple POS integrations in one restaurant is coming soon! If you’re interested in being a beta participant, please contact jamie@marginedge.com
• Multiple Count-By’s – We are working on adding support for Multiple Count-By’s on products for taking inventory. If you’re interested in giving feedback as we build this feature, please contact jamie@marginedge.com