Dayparting: switching breakfast, lunch and evening menus automatically

Dayparting means splitting the day into named slots, such as breakfast, lunch and evening, and scheduling a menu into each one, so your screens change over at the right time every day without anyone touching them. In Casty you set a daypart's start and end times once, schedule each menu into its daypart with a daily repeat, and the switch happens by itself. If the times change later, you edit the daypart and every screen follows.

Why it's worth setting up

The changeover from breakfast to lunch tends to land in the middle of a rush. That's exactly when nobody has a hand free to go and change a screen, so the breakfast menu stays up until someone notices, and in the meantime customers are asking for a full English the kitchen stopped doing half an hour ago.

Dayparts take the job off the staff entirely. They also handle the awkward bits people forget, like a later breakfast on Sundays or an afternoon tea that only runs for a few hours.

How it works in Casty

A daypart is a name plus a start and end time. You add them under Schedule, then Dayparting. Two are always there: Always (all day, every day) and Custom (you type the times into each event). Everything else you create yourself.

Then you schedule each menu as an event in the usual way, but on the Time step you choose the daypart from the Dayparting list in place of typing times. Pick the first day the menu should run, set Repeats to Day on the Repeats tab, and leave the Until date empty so it carries on.

The Casty demo does exactly this for Harbour Cafe in Falmouth. Breakfast runs from 07:00 to 11:30 and lunch from 11:30 to 15:00, both scheduled to a display group that holds the counter screen and the window screen, so one event covers both screens. The cafe breakfast and lunch tutorial goes through it step by step, and using dayparts covers the full set of options.

Dayparts save the most time when your hours change. Say you decide breakfast should finish at 11:00 instead. If you'd typed 11:30 into a dozen separate events, you'd be editing a dozen events. With a daypart you edit one entry, and every event that uses it moves.

Weekends and other differences

Not every venue keeps the same hours seven days a week, and dayparts allow for that. Each daypart can have exceptions: a different start and end time for a particular day of the week. In the demo, The Linden Hotel runs afternoon tea from 14:00 to 17:00, with an exception so it starts at 13:00 on Sundays. The same idea gives you a later breakfast at the weekend.

For a one-off day, like a bank holiday brunch, an exception is the wrong tool, because it would apply every week. Schedule a one-off event for that date instead and give it a priority of 1. A priority event plays in place of the everyday events on those screens while it runs, and the normal menus carry on afterwards.

Plan the changeover points

Line the dayparts up so one ends exactly when the next begins: breakfast to 11:30, lunch from 11:30.

If dayparts overlap, both menus are scheduled at once, and the screen plays them in turn. Customers see breakfast, then lunch, then breakfast again, which is confusing for everyone.

If there's a gap, the screen falls back to whatever else is scheduled at that time, or to its default layout if nothing is. That's fine as long as the default is something sensible at any hour, like your logo and opening times. The default layout explains how to set one for each screen.

A pub might run it like this: a lunch menu from 12:00 to 15:00, nothing food-related in the afternoon lull except the default welcome screen and a playlist of drinks offers, an evening menu from 17:00 to 21:00, then a "Kitchen's closed, bar's open" layout until closing. Your own times will differ, but the shape is the same.

Check the changeover before you rely on it. On the Events page, open Calendar View, click a day, then Agenda, and choose a specific point in time. The agenda lists what each screen or group is due to play at that moment, so you can check 11:29 and 11:31 without standing in front of the counter.

Dayparts beyond menus

Menus are the obvious use, but the same slots work for everything else on the screens. A cafe might push coffee and pastries in the morning, a meal deal at lunchtime and cake in the afternoon, each as a small playlist scheduled into its daypart. A bar can save the cocktail list for the evening, when people are ordering cocktails.

Seasonal menus fit too. Schedule the summer menu with an Until date at the end of the season and the autumn menu from the day after, and they change over by themselves.

After closing, you may want the screens off altogether. Supported displays can be switched off on a schedule, which saves power overnight; there's more in saving energy with screen operating hours.

Things that trip people up

• Time zone. Every screen runs on its own time zone, set on the screen's Details tab, and UK venues use Europe, London. If a screen's time zone is wrong, everything on it starts at the wrong hour.
• Unpublished layouts. Screens only play published layouts, so a new lunch menu still in draft won't appear at 11:30, however good the schedule is.
• Overlapping one-offs. A promotion scheduled at the same times as a menu plays in turn with it. That might be what you want, or it might not, so check the agenda.

For the wider picture of how events, repeats and priority fit together, see scheduling screen content. If you're building the menus themselves, start with digital menu boards.