Within your Omniboost Toast to Accounting integration, you may have encountered a mapping error related to items labelled as Open Drinks or Open Food. This article explains what these items are, why they cause mapping errors, and how to resolve them by correctly configuring your Toast environment.
What are Open Items?
An open item lets you ring up items or services that are not on your menu, with the price entered at the time it is added to a check. Open items are commonly used for corkage fees, room rentals, birthday parties, one-off events, catering, and tax-exempt sales such as pre-loaded gift cards.
By default, Toast includes two open items: Open Food and Open Drink. These allow your staff to ring up food or drink items that are not part of your standard menu by entering a custom name and price at the point of sale.
On the POS, staff select the +Open item button above the menus, choose the appropriate open item (Open Food or Open Drink), and enter a name and price. The item then appears on the check as entered.
It is important to distinguish open items from open-priced menu items. An open-priced menu item is an existing item on your menu that is configured to prompt the server for a price at the time of sale. This is common for daily specials where the price changes regularly. Open items, by contrast, are standalone entries for things that are not on your menu at all.
Why do these items cause a mapping error?
Your Omniboost integration uses sales categories from Toast to determine where each item should be posted in your accounting system. When a menu item does not have a sales category assigned, the integration cannot map it to an account code and a mapping error is returned.
Because Open Food and Open Drink are not part of your standard menu structure and are often set up during initial Toast configuration without further attention, they frequently do not have a sales category assigned. This makes them the most common cause of mapping errors in your Toast to Accounting integration.
How to resolve this
To resolve this, you will need to assign a sales category to your Open Food and Open Drink items in Toast. Navigate to Menus > Bulk management > Advanced properties. Open the Show/Hide dropdown and under Reporting, select Sales Category. From here, locate your Open Food and Open Drink items and assign them to the appropriate sales category.
Once assigned, click Save and then Publish your changes.
If you are unsure which sales category to assign these items to, consider the following:
If your Open Drink items typically represent beverages such as cocktails, corkage fees, or drink specials, assign them to your existing drinks or beverages sales category.
If your Open Food items typically represent one-off food charges or specials, assign them to your existing food sales category.
If you prefer all open items to be grouped together for reporting purposes, you can create a dedicated sales category (for example, "Open Items") and assign it to both.
The choice depends on how you want these items to appear in your accounting system. If you are unsure which approach best suits your setup, please reach out to your designated Omniboost agent and they will be able to advise.
Preventing future mapping errors
Open Food and Open Drink are the most common examples of this issue, but the same principle applies to any menu item in your Toast environment that does not have a sales category assigned. To avoid similar mapping errors in the future, ensure that every item on your menu, including modifiers, open-priced menu items, and newly added items, has a sales category assigned before publishing.
We strongly recommend reviewing your full menu periodically to confirm that no items have been added without a sales category. A correctly configured Toast environment ensures that all revenue flows through to your accounting system without errors or manual intervention.
What happens after making this change?
Once the sales categories have been assigned and published, the integration will automatically pick up the change from your next scheduled data transfer onwards. Any future sales of Open Food or Open Drink will be mapped correctly based on the mappings configured for that sales category.
Please note that this change only applies to future sales. If you require historical data to be corrected, please contact your designated Omniboost agent.
If you have any further questions, need assistance with any of the steps outlined in this article, or are unsure whether your integration is set up correctly after completing these steps, please do not hesitate to reach out to your designated Omniboost agent.
Alternatively, you can contact our support team directly at support@omniboost.io and we will be happy to help.