Deleting Items

There are two ways to take an item off your menu, and they suit different jobs. Make inactive hides the item but keeps it ready to come back. Delete removes it from your catalogue for good. Both are buttons at the bottom left of the item’s edit panel.

Making an item inactive

Find the item on the items list, click Edit, and click Make inactive at the bottom left of the panel. The item is saved and hidden in one step.

To retire several at once, use Bulk Edit Items at the bottom of the items list and untick the Active box on each row.

What changes when an item is inactive

The item disappears from every place you pick items:

• the item picker when you build or edit a quote
• your online order form
• your online menus

Everything that already exists is untouched. Quotes carrying the item still show it, still price it, and still print it on the dockets. Nothing a customer has already received changes.

Inactive is the right tool for seasonal menus

Nothing is thrown away when an item is inactive, so it can return whenever you want it. On the items list, switch on Show inactive items, find it, click Edit and click Make active. It comes back with its price, photo, dietary codes, options and docket names exactly as they were.

That makes inactive the right choice for anything that comes and goes:

• Seasonal dishes. A summer salad goes inactive in March and comes back in November with nothing retyped.
• Christmas and event menus. Build the menu once, hide it in January, bring it back in October.
• Items you are resting. A dish that is off while a supplier is short, or while you decide whether it earns its place.
• Anything that was ever on a quote. Keeping it inactive means you can still see exactly what that customer was quoted, and re-quote it next year in two clicks.

Deleting an item

An item has to be inactive before it can be deleted. Once it is, a red Delete button appears beside Make active at the bottom left of its edit panel, and beside Edit on its row when you have Show inactive items switched on.

Click Delete and confirm. The item is removed from your items list, your online forms and your menus, and it will not come back. If you need it again later, create it afresh.

Quotes you have already sent are safe. Every quote, chef docket, count sheet and sales report that used the item keeps its name, price, options and dietary codes, so nothing a customer received changes and your history still adds up.

When Puree will not let you deactivate or delete

Two things hold an item in place, and Puree names which one when it stops you:

• It is inside a bundle. Take it out of that bundle’s contents first, covered on our Bundles help page.
• It belongs to a package. Take it out of the package first, covered on our Packages help page.

In both cases something else on your menu is still assembled from this item, so letting it disappear would leave that bundle or package with a hole in it.

Deleting a category

Categories work differently, because a category is a heading rather than something a quote is built from. On the Menu Organisation page each category row carries one button, and which button you get depends on what is still inside it:

• Delete appears when the category is completely empty, with no items in it at all, active or inactive. This one is a real delete and the category is gone for good.
• Make inactive appears when everything inside it is already inactive. The category drops out of your quotes, online forms and menus, and the inactive items sitting in it stay exactly where they are.
• Make inactive, greyed out means the category still holds active items. Hover it and the tooltip says the same thing: deactivate the items first.

So the order of work is always the same. Deal with the items and the category follows. Deactivate every item in the category, or move them to another category, and the greyed out button becomes clickable. Empty the category out completely and it turns into Delete.

One thing to know: an item that has ever been on a quote stays on file behind the scenes after you delete it, so that those quotes keep working. A category that held one of those will offer Make inactive rather than Delete, which hides it just as completely.

An inactive category shows a Make active button to bring it back whenever you want it.

For creating and editing items, see Items & Categories.