Building order forms

Order forms (also called occasions) control what your customers see when they place an order for a particular site — which menu items are available, what event information you collect, and what extra questions you ask. This article covers creating and managing order forms from the Order Forms section of your site.

The Order Forms list

The Order Forms page lists every order form you've created for a site, with a search box to filter by name or description. Each form shows whether it's Active or Inactive, and gives you three actions: Preview (see it as a customer would), Edit Form, and delete.

If you haven't created any forms yet, you'll see a prompt to create your first one — this is what lets site users choose an occasion type when ordering.

Creating or editing a form

Select Create New Form (or Edit Form on an existing one) to open the Order Form Builder. The builder is organised into a settings section plus one tab per step that customers go through, and you can drag the step tabs to reorder the sequence customers will experience: Item Selection, Event Details, Dietary Requirements, and Custom Step.

Order Form Settings

Hero Image — an image shown on the occasion tile customers see when picking this form.
Form name — required; shown to customers (e.g. "Rowing Event").
Form Description — required; shown to customers underneath the form name.
Cut Off Time — optionally enable a deadline (for example, "next day") before which customers can no longer select an event date/time inside that window. Options are chosen from a preset list of cut-off durations.
Minimum Spend — optionally enforce a minimum cart subtotal before a customer can continue past item selection.

Item Selection

By default, if you don't configure anything here, customers ordering through this form can choose from your entire site catalogue. Use Configure Catalogue Items to restrict the form to a specific set of items instead. When picking items, any item with an internal name is shown as "Name — Internal name" (for example, "Lunch box — Kids"), and you can search by name, internal name, or description. Internal names are only shown to you, never to customers. Once you've added items, you can review them (grouped by category, showing price, tags, modifiers, and minimum order quantity) and remove any you no longer want included.

Event Details

This tab controls the fields customers fill in on the Event Details step of their order. You can drag fields to change the order they appear in. Event Name, Event Date, Expected Attendees, and Event Start Time are always shown to customers and can't be turned off ("System Mandatory"). For the remaining fields — Event Description, Event Location, Food Arrival Time, and Food Collection Time — you choose whether each is Mandatory, Optional, or Inactive (hidden from customers).

Dietary Requirements

Toggle Required Step to decide whether customers are asked about dietary requirements and allergies at all. When it's on, customers add each guest who has a requirement by name and pick that guest's allergens and dietaries from the same standard lists used for item tags, with a free-text field for anything else. These lists are fixed and aren't configured per form. You can separately require or make optional an Additional Dietary Notes free-text field — if required, customers must fill it in before continuing; if not enabled, it isn't shown to them at all.

Custom Step

Use this tab to add a fully custom step with your own questions, for occasions that need information the standard steps don't cover. Select Add Step to create one, then:

Give the step a name (shown to customers as the step heading) and toggle whether it's enabled for customers.
Select Add Field to add a question, up to a maximum of 10 fields per form.
For each field, set a label, choose a field type (Single-line Text, Paragraph / Text Area, Drop-down with single or multiple selection, Radio Buttons, Checkboxes, Date, or Time), and mark it Required, Optional, or Inactive.
For choice-based field types (drop-downs, radio buttons, checkboxes), add the options customers will choose from — each such field needs at least 2 options.
Drag fields to reorder them.

Previewing your form

Select Preview at any point while building a form to see it exactly as a customer would, including your current unsaved changes.

Publishing, saving as draft, and updating

Publish form makes the form active and visible to customers immediately.
Save as Inactive keeps the form hidden from customers (useful while you're still setting it up, or to temporarily take a form out of circulation).
If you edit a form that's already published, saving shows a warning — Update Published Form? — because your changes will immediately update what customers see.

Deleting a form

What happens when you try to delete a form depends on its state:

A draft form with no order history is deleted immediately after you confirm.
A published form with no order history can also be deleted, with a warning that it will disappear from the ordering screen right away.
A form that already has orders against it cannot be deleted — you can set it to inactive instead to hide it from customers while keeping its order history intact.
If a form is the only active form for a site, it cannot be deleted — at least one form must stay active for the site so customers can place orders.