Breakfast belongs to the morning; cocktails belong to the evening. Yet on many digital menus every item sits there all day — the guest scrolls past a breakfast they cannot order at 8 p.m. and a signature cocktail that isn’t served at 8 a.m. Menu scheduling, known in restaurants as dayparting, fixes this by showing each menu, category or product only inside the hours it truly belongs to. In this guide we explain how scheduling works and how you set it up without touching your existing menu.
What is menu scheduling (dayparting)?
Menu scheduling is a set of time rules that decide when a part of your menu is visible. Dayparting is the restaurant term for the same idea: the day is split into parts — morning, afternoon, evening, late night — and each part gets the content that fits it. Breakfast shows only in the morning, the evening dinner menu appears after dark, and happy hour lives inside its own window. The guest always sees a menu that matches the moment, not a long list they have to filter in their head.
Reusable "Service Hours": define once, assign everywhere
The heart of scheduling is a reusable time rule set we call Service Hours. You define a window once — say, breakfast from 07:00 to 10:30 — and assign it to as many places as you like. When the kitchen moves breakfast half an hour later, you change that single Service Hours set and every menu, category and product using it updates at the same moment. You never comb through the menu editing times one by one; the rule lives in one place and everything attached to it follows.
Assign at three levels: menu, category or a single product
Scheduling isn’t all-or-nothing. You attach a Service Hours rule at whichever level makes sense, per placement:
- Menu (tab): hide a whole late-night menu outside its hours, so the tab itself appears only when it is served.
- Category: show a "Breakfast" or "Happy Hour" category only inside its window while the rest of the menu stays put.
- Single product: schedule one item — a weekend brunch dish, an evening special — without touching anything around it.
Because rules are set per placement, the same product can follow one schedule at the pool bar and another in the main restaurant.
Hours, days and special dates
A Service Hours rule is more than an opening and closing time. You combine three kinds of condition:
- Hour: the daily window, for example 07:00–10:30. Windows may cross midnight too — a late bar running 22:00–02:00 is a single, valid window.
- Weekday: limit a rule to certain days, such as a brunch that appears only on Saturday and Sunday.
- Special dates: a date range for a summer menu, or a holiday closure that hides content on specific days.
Each rule is a Show or Hide instruction, and when an item carries several rules they combine with OR logic: the item is shown if any of its show-windows currently matches. That lets you build patterns like "weekday mornings, plus all day Sunday" from simple pieces.
Hidden from display and ordering — checked on the server
When a product falls outside its window it doesn’t just fade from the list; it is hidden from both the display and ordering. The guest cannot see it and cannot order it. Crucially, this availability is re-validated on the server rather than trusted to the phone. Even if a menu was left open in a browser as the window closed, an order for an out-of-hours item won’t go through. Scheduling stays honest: what the guest can order is always what you are actually serving right now.
Additive by design: nothing changes until you schedule it
Scheduling is layered on top of your menu, not baked into it. Any item without a schedule is simply always visible, exactly as before. So turning the feature on changes nothing until you choose to schedule something. You can start with a single category — breakfast, say — leave the rest of the menu exactly as it is, and add more windows over time. There is no risky switch-over; you opt in place by place, at your own pace.
See it before your guests do: heatmap and time-travel preview
Times are easy to get wrong on paper, so the panel shows you the result before a guest ever does. A weekly heatmap lays out the whole week at a glance, so you can see when each menu, category or product is visible and catch a gap or an overlap. A time-travel preview goes further: pick a restaurant, a day and an hour, and the panel shows exactly what a guest would see at that moment. Check that breakfast really disappears at 10:30, or that the late bar opens at 22:00, without waiting for the clock.
Menu scheduling with Avdena
Avdena QR Menu brings all of this into one panel. You build reusable Service Hours sets, then assign them to a menu, a category or a single product, per placement. Rules combine hour, weekday and special dates, handle windows that cross midnight, and layer with OR logic — while any unscheduled item stays visible as it always was. Out-of-window items are hidden from both the menu and ordering, re-checked on the server, and you preview the whole plan with a weekly heatmap and a time-travel view. At a Demo Hotel that means breakfast in the morning, cocktails in the evening and happy hour in its own window, all without reprinting a thing.
If you want the right menu to appear at the right time, take a look at our QR Menu page and see how scheduling fits into your daily service.