Rearranging menu slots

September 6, 2026

Menu # positions decide what a customer who doesn't choose is served on renewal, so they are worth getting right. Until now the only way to change one was to type a number, and there was nothing on screen to tell you what a position meant in your other weeks — or that you had left one empty. The menu and template editors now show the full picture and let you rearrange it directly.

What changed

Meals are listed in position order and grouped by section, with a count for each — so a week that has four desserts where the others have five shows it at a glance.

Drag a meal by its handle to move it in the order; the meals it passes close up behind it. Typing a number still works and does something different on purpose: it puts that meal at that exact position and swaps places with whatever was there.

Positions you are not using are shown as empty rows instead of being invisible. The next meal you add lands in the lowest empty position, and Close gaps tidies the numbering when you want it tidied — deleting a meal never renumbers the rest on its own.

Moving a meal into another section now closes the position it came from, so building a week as main meals and then pulling the add-ons out no longer leaves a hole behind each one.

Under every meal, and under every empty position, a line shows what your other templates hold at that same number.

Why it matters

Auto-assign gives a customer who has not chosen the meal sitting at the position they picked last time. That only produces a sensible box when a position means a similar kind of meal every week — position 3 is always the salad, position 12 is always the beef dish. Keeping several templates lined up that way was work nobody could see: the numbering is handed out in the order meals are added, so templates drift apart quietly.

The comparison line makes the drift visible where you can act on it, and dragging makes fixing it a few seconds' work instead of a spreadsheet exercise.

Orders that are already scheduled keep exactly the meals the customer chose. When a change moves numbers those orders depend on, Servd asks first, tells you how many are affected, and moves each stored position along with its meal so nothing on the customer's side changes.

How to use it

Turn on slot-based auto-assignment in Menus → Settings. The Menu # column, the drag handles and the empty positions all appear with it; with it off, positions are hidden and nothing is auto-assigned.

Open Menus → Templates (or Weekly Menus) and open a menu. Drag meals into the order you want, or type a number to place one exactly. Use the section dropdown to move a meal between main meals and add-ons.

Aim for the same kind of meal at the same number across your templates. The line under each meal tells you what the other weeks have there, so you can work through one template and check it against the rest without leaving the page.