Best Practices For Reimporting a Menu

In this article, we’ll go over the four best practices for reimporting your menu from Square to KioskBuddy. Remember, any changes you make in Square won’t automatically appear in KioskBuddy. You’ll need to use these reimport practices to bring them over. 

1. Get in the habit of reimporting link

While you can make changes to your menu directly in KioskBuddy, we always recommend making the change first in Square and then bringing it over to KioskBuddy using the reimport step. Doing so will result in less confusion about your offerings over the long term. When you make edits directly in KioskBuddy, there is no way to automatically sync those with your Square Item Library. If you get in the habit of making the most of your big edits in KioskBuddy, you’ll soon find there are many mismatches between your Square Item Library and your KioskBuddy menu.

Let’s look at a real customer example:

A customer wants to update their KioskBuddy menu. In this case, there are two changes they want to make. They want to change tax and they want to change price.

They are able to accomplish changing the tax directly in KioskBuddy:

They are also able to change the price:

However, if they make these changes in KioskBuddy, they will not appear in Square. Because of this, when the customer decides to reimport a menu from Square and wants to bring over a lot of changes, the tax and the price that have been changed in KioskBuddy but not Square will show up as items to reimport.

These differences will continue to show up with every reimport. If the correct pricing information is in KioskBuddy but not in Square, that customer will have to remember this is the case and make sure to not reimport that specific change. Here, we can see it's much easier in the long run to change the tax and pricing in Square first and then reimport those changes. 

2. Make a partial reimport link

If there’s a quick menu change you’d like to make, you can make this change first in Square and then quickly reimport that single change directly via the individual parts in the menu (category, item, variation, modifier, etc). Let’s look at a customer example. 

If you’re a coffee shop and you’d like to change the name of “White Americano” on your menu to “Americano With Milk”, you’d first change that in Square and then head over to your KioskBuddy dashboard, click the edit button next to "White Americano", then "Reimport".

See what pops up!

3. Narrow down your reimport changes link

There are three ways to narrow down your reimports.

First, from the reimport pop up, you can see there are three kinds of differences that are detected: Changes, Additions, and Deletions.

Under “Changes”, you can find the changes you’ve made to anything pre-existing in Square (items, categories, modifiers, pricing, etc.). Under “Additions” you can find any new items or categories you’ve added to your Square Item Library. Under “Deletions”, you'll see anything you’ve deleted in Square.

The second thing you can do if you have a lot of differences you need to sort through is to do a simple search to help you find what you’re looking for. 

Here are some examples of search terms you can use:

• If you have a modifier named "honey boba" that you recently changed the price of in Square, you could search for "honey boba" to bring up all of those modifiers.

• If you offer sandwiches and recently made name changes to all of your sandwich items, you could search for "sandwich" to bring up all of the items that include "sandwich" in the name.

• If you've altered the price of something, you would search for the word "price" (not the dollar amount like "$1.99").

The third thing you can do to narrow down changes is to filter through the reimport differences by selecting or deselecting entire groups. For example, if you change the pricing on multiple items in Square and want to bring those changes across into KioskBuddy, you’d “deselect all”, then “select” “changes in price”, and then press “apply changes”.

4. Understand KioskBuddy-specific properties link

There are certain changes you can make to your menu that you can only do inside KioskBuddy and not Square. Here is a table of those specific properties: