How to position and change the colour of your till buttons

One of the most commonly used features of Memsec7 is the Button Positions screen. This allows you to determine the layout of your till. There are various aspects you can alter, each applicable to one or more tills at your discretion. You can decide how many category and item buttons will be shown, in which order they appear and the colour of the button and its text. You save each combination as a layout template so you can have multiple configurations and switch between them.

To access the button position screen go to Tills>Till Setup>Button Positions in the back office program. There you can choose to edit an existing layout or add a new one. The number of buttons displayed under a layout is set using the number boxes at the top left just under the layout name, which you can of course also change. The default is 12 categories and 20 item buttons but these can be increased in steps of 2 or 4 respectively to 24 and 40.

At the top right of this screen you have 3 choices of button types to configure. Categories is the first and is selected by default. The second is Sale Items and the third is for Popular Items.

Click on categories to move and colour your category buttons. The Sale Items button will show a drop-down box underneath to allow you to select one category at a time and then move and colour the buttons in that category. Similarly Popular Items allows you to select different categories and then add items from those categories to your list of most commonly sold lines. Again, you can move and colour these to suit your requirements. If there are any unused items of the type you’ve selected these will appear in the unused items list on the right-hand side.

Some general tips on moving buttons:

• Double-click on an item in the unused items list to add it to the next unoccupied button.
• Double-click on a button to remove that item from the current button layout and place it into the unused items list.
• Click on an item in the list or an existing button then drag it to a new position or off into the list of unused buttons.
• Drag a button to another occupied position to swap the two items around.
• To move a button to a different page, place it into the unused items list, change the page using the arrow buttons at the bottom then drag it onto the new page
• There are buttons at the foot of the page to sort alphabetically, remove any empty spaces, insert all items and show combined items.
• To remove all items, right-click on one of the buttons and select ‘Remove All Items’ from the menu that appears.

It’s now possible to have different colour category buttons and different colour item buttons within each category. There are a number of reasons why you might benefit from doing this;

• Colour food and drink category buttons to differentiate them.
• Highlight lines you want your staff to up-sell.
• Wine colours – help staff find wine buttons more easily by colour-coding them.
• Do similar for beer buttons, e.g. Stout in black, Lagers in gold etc.
• Vegetarian dishes can have green buttons, beef or lamb dishes red, poultry dishes white.
• Use different colours for starters, mains and desserts, especially where they’re together in a single category.
• Group items into price bands and colour them accordingly.

At the top right corner of the unused items list there’s a small colour palette. Click on this to switch from the list to the new colour selection tools.

Location of colour palette button

The selector offers you a range of 48 different colours for the button background and text colour. These are shades of red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue and pink, plus a greyscale from white to black. There’s a test button so you can see what your choices might look like before you apply them. Once you’ve set the colours simply click on the relevant button(s) on the layout to change them. There’s also a set all option and a reset button in case you change your mind. There’s also a button to restore the current colour choice to the default. Each button, once coloured, retains its colour no matter where it’s positioned.

Colour selector screen

The colours make up part of the till template just like the positions. This means you can have multiple layouts for different tills or times of day.