Features
Everything DisplayFleet does, in detail.
Written plainly, and limited to what the product does today. The last section covers some of what we are still building.
The menu designer
A canvas the size of your screen, edited in the browser.
You lay out a board by dragging elements onto a canvas set to the resolution of the screen it will play on: 1080p or 4K, landscape or portrait, or a custom size. What you arrange is what plays.
Four kinds of element cover a menu board:
- Text, with rich formatting, for headings and notes.
- Item lists, which pull from your menu items so a price change is made in one place.
- Combo panels, for meal deals and multi-item offers.
- Images, from your own media library.
A board can also run a slideshow of images and video behind or alongside the menu, and you can preview a screen exactly as the renderer will draw it before you point a television at it.
Dayparting
Breakfast, lunch, happy hour and late night, without anyone touching a remote.
A daypart is a name and a set of time windows: which days of the week, from when, until when. Each screen gets a menu per daypart, so the drive-through board and the counter board can change at the same moment to different menus.
Three details that matter in a real restaurant, and that thinner tools get wrong:
- Windows may run past midnight. Late night from 22:00 to 02:00 is one window, not two.
- Times are evaluated in your organisation's timezone, not the server's, so boards change at your local hour rather than a datacentre's.
- Overlaps resolve deterministically. Dayparts have a priority, so a holiday menu can outrank lunch without deleting lunch.
Screens are told when the next change is due and fetch it on the boundary, rather than waiting for the next poll to notice.
Per-location prices
The reason a chain needs something other than a slideshow app.
A menu belongs to the organisation, not to a store. When one location charges more for the same burger, you set an override on that item at that location. The menu stays single. Editing the item edits it everywhere, and the override stays put.
The alternative, which is what most menu board tools leave you with, is a duplicate menu per location and a manual reconciliation every time the kitchen changes something. That is the thing that stops being possible at about the fourth store.
Screens and fleet health
Pairing, status, remote control, and being told when a board goes dark.
Pairing, not URLs
A screen is paired, not pointed at a secret link. You open the player page on the device, it displays a short code, and you claim that code from the dashboard. The device then holds its own credential, issued once and stored only as a hash.
There is no unauthenticated board address to leak. That was a deliberate change: an unguessable URL is not access control.
Knowing a screen stopped
Every player checks in on a heartbeat. When one stops answering, its status moves to offline and the owner and every admin get one email naming it. One email per outage, not one per minute.
You can also ask a screen what it is showing right now. It reports the menu it resolved, the daypart in effect and how much of the board actually drew, which answers "is that board wrong, or is that board stuck".
Remote control
Refresh a screen, clear its cached media, or restart the player app from the dashboard, without a trip to the store or a phone call to whoever is on shift.
It keeps playing without you
The player caches the board and its media, so a screen that loses its network keeps playing rather than dropping to an error page, and picks up changes when the connection returns.
One limit worth knowing: a screen that is power-cycled while the network is down comes back with its layout and images but without item prices, until it can reach us again. Closing that gap is on the list below.
Media, fonts and branding
A media library
Upload images and video once and reuse them across menus. Everything is resized and re-encoded automatically, so a phone photo does not become a slow board. Only the original counts against your storage; the versions we generate are free.
Video that plays
Video slides are transcoded to H.264 and AAC for broad browser compatibility, with a still frame for the moment before playback starts.
Your own fonts
Upload your brand's fonts as woff2 files and set the palette once. Colours are stored as palette slots, so re-theming the organisation re-colours every board you have already built. The admin screens support light and dark.
Your team, and your account
Four roles
Owner, admin, editor and viewer. A shift manager can fix a price without being able to touch billing or remove a colleague, and a franchise partner can be given read-only access to the account.
Staff are invited by email, and invitations expire after a week. Menu, price, location, screen, daypart, team and plan changes are recorded in an activity log with who did it and when, so "who changed the lunch menu on Tuesday" has an answer.
Billing that does not hold your screens hostage
Payments run through Stripe, so card details never touch us. If a card fails you get an email and a grace period. If it stays unpaid the account goes read-only: the boards keep playing and nothing is deleted.
Upgrade or downgrade in the app. A downgrade checks that you are inside the smaller plan's limits first, so it cannot silently orphan a location.
What is not here yet
Published for the same reason as everything above: so nobody buys this on a promise.
Point of sale sync
One-way menu sync from Clover and Square is built and under test, but there is no way for a merchant to connect an account yet, so it is not something you can switch on today. Do not choose DisplayFleet on the strength of POS sync.
Pictures of what a screen is showing
A screen can tell you which menu and daypart it has resolved and how much of the board drew, but it cannot yet send back an image of itself. That is being built.
One timezone per account
Dayparts are evaluated in a single timezone set for the whole organisation. If your locations span more than one, they will all change on the same clock. Per-location timezones are being built.
Prices on a screen that reboots while offline
A player caches its board, but item prices are fetched separately and are not cached yet. A screen restarted during a network outage therefore comes back with its layout and images and no prices, until the connection returns. Being fixed.
Removing or replacing a paired device
There is no way yet to revoke or remove a paired device, which also means a screen whose player has been replaced cannot be paired to a new one. If that happens, contact us before you buy a replacement and we will tell you where it stands. Self-service revocation is being built and is the next thing we are shipping.
Try it on a screen you already own
Thirty days, no card, and the sample menu is one click.