Avero & Digital Dining POS
Digital Dining is supported for Sales data and Labor data.
Avero processes and presents data from your Digital Dining POS for your analysis and insight. This article details how to handle POS changes, make updates to this data, and how to handle discrepancies or problems you might encounter. For some things, such as adding meal periods or revenue centers, you must complete the action on your side in order for it to be reflected in Avero (maybe with the help of your POS reseller or IT technician) and for some changes, such as global category associations, you'll need to reach out to our support team.
In this article:
- About Digital Dining POS
- Installation & Reinstallation
- Regular Maintenance: Making Updates and Changes
- Common Problems
- Frequently Asked Questions About Digital Dining
About Digital Dining POS
POS Type: On-Premise
Avero is proud to offer Free Installation & Reinstallation for Digital Dining, and most POS systems.
Digital Dining is an on-premise system, meaning there is a server on-site at your restaurant that runs your point of sale. Avero's data extraction utility is installed on this server and each day runs the data from yesterday and transmits it to Avero to load into the platform that you can access via the web or in an app on your phone or tablet.
Differences between Digital Dining & Avero
Digital Dining reports should be generally expected to match Avero's reporting as well. Labor overtime is calculated during the pre-processing step of our data extraction, so some small variances may be noticed, but these are negligible and generally infrequent. Voids on deleted checks are not available, however, voids on checks that are closed out normally are reflected.
Installation & Reinstallation on Digital Dining
POS Code: ddining
Digital Dining is an on-premise, table-service POS System. We allow our customers to save on the wait time and cost of an assisted installation by providing a supported installation process instead. If you are moving to Digital Dining from another POS, installing Avero on your system for the first time, or reinstalling after a server upgrade or change, you can simply and easily perform the installation! Or your POS reseller can install the Avero Data Extraction Utility at the time they perform your server change or upgrade. Avero installation takes only a few minutes and has 4 major steps.
- Prepare for the installation. This means following our Pre-Install Checklist which will make sure you have the access needed and that our interactions will be marked safe by your system security by whitelisting Avero in your firewall (IT or your POS reseller can assist with this!).
- Retrieve your business information from our support team: Open a Reinstall Ticket
- Proceed to follow our Avero Installation Instructions. (8-12 minutes)
- Input Meal Period Information (pop-up window during Install).
Regular Maintenance: Making Updates and Changes for Digital Dining
When changes or updates are needed who is responsible? If something appears incorrect or out-of-date, how should it be updated?
Change or Add a Meal Period in Digital Dining
Meal periods for your POS are hard-coded in Avero's data extractor at the time of your install. During installation, a pop-up window appears for you to input your meal periods. If changes are made to meal periods in Digital Dining, these will not automatically flow into Avero, you must update the meal periods in your DEU Options.
To update meal periods in Digital Dining:
- Open the Avero DEU, select Options. (Note: If Options requires a password, you need to update your DEU. An update takes 2-5 minutes: DEU Update)
- In the Options menu, select 'Point of Sale' and go to the Miscellaneous tab. Click 'Set POS Parameters' to open the meal periods menu:
- In the Meal Periods screen, update the meal periods according to what has changed.
- Set the Open Time - this will be the start of your first meal period of the day.
- Provide a Name and End Time for each meal period for each day of the week.
- Meal Periods must use 24 hour time. Example: Lunch ends at 16:00 which is 4pm.
- Every meal period requires an end time every day. If you Have Breakfast and Lunch Monday-Friday but Brunch on Saturday/Sunday. End Breakfast one minute after opening and Lunch one minute after Breakfast on weekend days.
- The last meal period of the day must end 1 minute before open time.
- Select Done to close meal periods, then Apply and OK to close options.
Important to note - Meal Period changes/additions will not automatically update your logbook or saved reports.
Change or Add a Revenue Center in Digital Dining
You can change or add revenue centers to your POSconfiguration and see them reflected in Avero as soon as the next day. Changing a revenue center's name will only affect the data moving forward. Avero Support cannot change or edit your revenue centers for you.
Categories & Items in Digital Dining
Avero provides the following Global categories: Beverage, Food, Misc., Other, and Retail. The major and minor categories come from your POS.
To make changes to items you'll need to update Digital Dining - changing an item name, price, or moving it between categories.
To make changes to major/minor categories you'll need to update your POS - changing category names, updating which items are in a category, making categories more specific, changing minor to major category relationships.
To make changes to global categories, you'll need to open a ticket and request Avero makes the change. For example, if Appetizers are appearing under Beverage and need to be moved to Food.
When creating new Categories, they may default to Other and require a ticket to update this mapping.
To read more see: Categories
Common Problems
It is very important to keep an active connection to your POS server should you ever need Avero Support to access the server and assist. Please visit our article on Remote Access to On-site Servers.
Digital Dining Missing Data
Missing data happens. We invest ourselves continuously into making this process faster and more reliable, but it is not, and will never be, error-proof. The internet goes down; equipment fails, bugs pop up, etc. Occasional delays are to be expected. For your system, we provide you the ability to recover your own data on-demand, any time you notice it missing, in just a couple of clicks. This data is processed and loaded into the Avero platform automatically within 2 hours, so you don't have to wait for a support agent, have any back and forth, or wait an entire day to rerun your reports. You are able to select the date on a calendar and send it - which means you have your data when you need it.
Simple instructions that take less than three minutes are found here, see On-Premise Data Recovery: Missing / Incorrect Data
Data Discrepancies - Avero's sales data is not matching Digital Dining
If you notice your sales data is not matching up with your POS reports, there are three actions you need to complete:
- Make sure the data discrepancy exists in Avero by logging in and running a sales report. If you notice incorrect data in an emailed report, it may be related to email settings and not the data itself. See our troubleshooting guide: Troubleshooting Email Reports with Missing or Incomplete Data
- Run a Register Report from Digital Dining for the date in question that shows the figures that aren't matching, Open a Data Ticket, attach the report and explain the discrepancy. Make sure to include the report, the date, and the revenue center or location if you have access to several, as well as any examples you can provide.
Our team investigates all data discrepancies - due to the nature of our daily data extraction a single date and single-day sales report must be provided. We cannot investigate date ranges, but it is helpful to know if the issue is recurring and you can provide multiple dates.
Frequently Asked Questions About Digital Dining
Why don't Avero's sales look the same as my Digital Dining reports?
Avero and Digital Dining generally do not have variances, with the exception of voids from deleted check missing. If you are experiencing a data discrepancy, run sales reporting from DD to show the discrepancy, Open a Data Ticket, attach the report and explain the discrepancy.
Is there any information Digital Dining doesn't export to Avero?
There are some data limitations you may notice based on what we receive from Digital Dining.
Digital Dining does not send the following data points:
- Order Type Information
- Transferred Check Information
- $0 Modifiers (Read more about this here: Modifiers)
Why do I recover missing data myself?
We've invested in improvements to our data extraction capabilities and documentation so that it is easy for users to recover their data without relying on a back-and-forth with support. We believe this creates a better user experience. Now, when users on-site follow the instructions to recover data (it takes less than 1 minute) they get immediate results and the data is loaded into the Avero platform within 2 hours. You can also open a ticket to recover missing data, but it will not load until the next day.
Does Avero pull credit card information from my Digital Dining system?
No. Avero pulls payment type information, such as what type of card is used and the amount of the payment from all systems. We can also pull payment reference information (what is contained depends on your configuration) and Customer Name from Digital Dining, if available. We do not have access to, collect or store, full credit card numbers, though the last four digits can be displayed to identify checks and payments. Whether or not this is shown depends on your POS configuration.
Can I pull back / historical data from my Digital Dining server?
Yes! If you are a new customer, are missing recent data, or have just added a new profit center that already had sales that weren't loaded to Avero, you can run the data extraction for previous dates. The data that is available and extractable on Digital Dining servers varies, but typically up to 30 days may be available. Data is not extractable after 30 days.
Instructions on running the data extraction are here: Missing / Incorrect Data