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What are Order Types?

Updated

Order Types / Order Modes

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POS systems offer different ways to categorize and tag your revenue, items, and guest checks from Meal Periods to Item Categories, and many offer an Order Type or Order Mode function. This guide explains what these are, how to make updates to them, how to use them for reporting purposes, and shares some best practices for their use. Read on to learn more or jump to your specific interest:

What are Order Modes / Order Types?

Order Modes, Order Types, Check Types, are all terms to describe organizing your checks for later analysis. They may give a heads up to team members in the restaurant about certain conditions. 

Commonly, we see order types used for distinctions like 'To-Go,' 'Delivery,' 'Eat-In,' or 'Events'. 

Order types/modes should not be used in place of meal periods. Meal Periods should be fixed time periods throughout the day, and if you are manually applying them regardless of the time of day, Avero may not be able to adequately reflect them. 

We generally recommend against using Order Types/Modes in place of Revenue Centers, which generally reflect areas of the restaurant like 'Bar' vs 'Dining Room'. In a small operation or for a POS that doesn't offer revenue center programming, this can be an option. 

How can I create, change, or update Order Modes / Order Types?

Updating the Order Modes in Avero is as easy as changing them in your POS! Once you make a change in your POS, you'll see the new data reflected in Avero after the next data load. 

Some systems require the meal periods to be coded on the Avero side, to see if this applies to your system select your system from our list of *Avero POS Integrations to view the POS guide for your system.

Order Modes / Types in Reporting

Order Types are often used to allow the separation of sales outside of what is done through revenue centers/cost centers/profit centers or meal periods/day parts. In order to analyze data, it is important to compare like sales and remove anomalies for cleaner data. In establishments that don't have an event or banquets revenue center for example can be inflating or deflating an average check percent when an event of 50 people is grouped in with your average table of 2 to 4 people. Although it averages by cover, they were likely not offered the same steps of service or even the same menu. This is where you can utilize order types to remove these from sales amounts for effective reporting and also run specific analyses on your events.

Order Types / Modes Best Practices

  • Delivery services have become incredibly popular throughout the industry but are not always the most profitable solution for restaurants. Order Types are a great way to track the different services that you use in order to have clear visibility into your sales as it relates to each service, especially with check averages. You can set up an order type for each service to view sales easily and compare these metrics.
  • If you offer a membership such as a wine club or rewards system and would like to track sales for members, order types are a great solution. If there are different tiers of membership, you may also create a unique order type per tier level. 
  • To Go is a popular order type at most organizations. Separating to-go checks allows for better comparison reporting when viewing your check averages. To-go checks tend to be lower as alcoholic beverages are often not purchased and upsell opportunities are less frequent. This also allows you to track your to-go sales separately and work with staff with upsell potential even on a brief call. 
  • There are sometimes unique situations that may not be frequent but would benefit from specific order types. If you have a unique function that occurs such as a seasonal event or specific group of people that frequent your business, it may benefit from an order type so you can review sales later and potentially track the frequency in which the event occurs. 

 

 

 

  

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