Group Ordering (Corporate Meal Program)

Group ordering lets a company feed their whole team from your webstore without you lifting a finger to collect everyone's picks. A company admin — the organizer — sets a per-person budget and invites their team by email. Each person chooses their own items from your menu, and at a deadline the system combines everything into one order on your board, paid by the company.

Companies can also set up recurring programs — for example, lunch every weekday at noon — and the system creates each day's order automatically.

Turning It On

Group ordering is off by default. To enable it for a store:

1. Go to Webstore Settings for the location.
2. Open the Checkout section and find the Group ordering group.
3. Turn on Enable group ordering.

There is a second toggle, Auto-confirm group orders. Leave it off and finished group orders land in your webstore orders queue for a staff member to accept, exactly like any other web order. Turn it on and they confirm themselves at the deadline — invoicing and kitchen production flow immediately with no staff click.

How It Works for Your Customers

You don't manage this part — but here's what your customers experience so you can support them.

The organizer (whoever pays) — must have a storefront account:

1. Signs in, starts a group order from the storefront cart, choosing the service date/time, a per-person budget, and an ordering deadline.
2. Invites their team by email. Each invitee gets a personal link.
3. Watches a live dashboard: who has ordered, who hasn't, and the running total. They can remove items, invite more people, extend the deadline, or lock the order early. (Anyone who hasn't ordered gets an automatic email reminder an hour before the deadline.)

Each participant (team member) — no account required:

• Clicks their invite link and browses your menu like a normal shopper, but with a budget meter showing how much of their allowance is left. The system blocks anything over their cap.
• They never see checkout, prices to pay, or card entry — the company pays for everything.

At the deadline the cart locks, the order is priced, and:

• The organizer gets an email with the quote and a payment link (card), or the order bills to their house account if they're on terms.
• Each participant gets a summary of what was ordered for them.

Participants who miss the deadline simply aren't in the order — the organizer can add something for them before the deadline or extend it.

What You See in the Back Office

A group order becomes a regular sales order — production, invoicing, editing, and refunds all work exactly as they do for any other order. On top of that:

• Group Orders page — Sales → Group Orders in the left navigation lists every group order at your location: ones customers started themselves, ones created by recurring programs, and ones your staff set up. Filter by status, see at a glance who has ordered ("3/4 ordered"), and jump straight to the underlying sales order. From here you can also cancel an open group order.
• Group order panel — the sales order page shows the organizer's contact details, the budget, the deadline, and a per-person breakdown: each participant's items and spend. Handy when someone calls asking "what did Maria order?" While the order is still editable, staff can also add or remove people right on the panel.
• Named labels — when you print distribution labels for a group order, each item's label can include a "Prepared for" name, so the delivery driver or pickup counter can hand the right bag to the right person. Add the Prepared for (recipient) field to your label template to use it.

Transcribing an Emailed Team Order

Customers often email a team order instead of using the storefront: "Ana wants the chicken box, Ben wants the salad…". Staff can turn that email into a fully-attributed group order:

1. Create a normal draft sales order for the customer and set the service day.
2. Click the Group Order action in the order's quick navigation and give it a name.
3. Add each person by name on the group order panel (email is optional).
4. Add the lines as usual, then use the "For" selector under each line to say whose item it is.

You get the same per-person breakdown and named distribution labels as a storefront group order — with no invitations, deadlines, or customer logins involved. The order continues through your normal quote/confirm flow.

Recurring Programs (Standing Orders)

A company can save a recurring program: a schedule (every weekday, every other day, specific days), a budget, a saved team roster, and a service time. The system then creates each occurrence automatically a few days ahead, re-invites the roster, and runs the deadline as usual.

Things to know:

• Recurring programs always bill on account. The company needs an active house account (a charge-now, invoice-later credit line you set up on their customer record) before they can create a program — nobody wants to type a card number every day. One-off group orders can still pay by card.
• Closures are handled automatically. If an occurrence falls on a day you're closed (or a day you don't offer their fulfillment method), that day is skipped and the organizer is notified. The program keeps going.
• If a total might exceed the company's credit limit, the order still goes through as a quote and the organizer is warned by email — nothing silently fails at the last minute.
• The organizer can pause, resume, skip the next occurrence, or end the program from their storefront dashboard at any time.
• Adding someone to the roster takes effect immediately: the new person is invited to any occurrences that are already open for ordering, plus all future ones. Removing someone only affects future occurrences.

Staff can run programs too

Everything the organizer can do from the storefront, your staff can do from the back office — Sales → Group Orders → Recurring Programs:

• See every program at your location (customer-created and staff-created), with its schedule, roster, upcoming service days, recent orders, and whether the customer's house account is in good shape.
• Create a program on a customer's behalf — pick the customer, choose invite or curated mode, set the schedule and roster, and the system takes it from there. The customer never has to log in. The customer still needs an active house account first.
• Pause, resume, skip the next order, end the program, edit settings, and manage the roster — same rules as the storefront, including immediate invites for newly added people.

Curated Mode: When the Team Doesn't Pick

Some companies don't want each employee choosing — they just want "12 sandwich boxes and 3 salads, every Tuesday." A program can run in curated mode: instead of inviting participants to order, the organizer (or your staff, working with them) defines a fixed list of items that is placed automatically each occurrence.

Staff manage a curated program's standing order directly on its back-office page: search for a menu item, set a quantity, optionally pick who it's for, and it's placed on every future occurrence. Curated lines assigned to named people from the roster make distribution labels print names even though nobody logged in to order.

When Something Goes Wrong