Shipped in September 2026

A short round-up of everything that went live across Stampede in September 2026.

Search finds every dish

Shipped 25 September. Search on the table-ordering menu now looks inside a vendor's sub-lists, so a guest typing a dish name at a food hall gets the dish back rather than a vendor with nothing under it. We got the structure wrong: on a food hall menu the vendor is a list and the vendor's dishes sit in sub-lists below it, and search only read the top level. A guest searching katsu saw the vendor, tapped through, and found results that did not contain the thing they had just typed. Two quieter faults went with it. The suggestion list gave up when the menu came back in an older response shape, and the suggest call timed out before a large menu had finished answering, so some guests got an empty list and assumed the kitchen had sold out. The timeout is longer now, and the suggestion list handles the older shape instead of failing on it.

There is nothing to turn on. It is live on the guest-facing menu behind the table code and on the separate order-to-collect link, in PayOS, wherever a menu is built from vendor sub-lists. Picture a Saturday at 7:40pm, six people round one table at a food hall, one shared basket going to the till. Two of them want the vendor at the far end but cannot see the signage from where they are sitting. They type the dish, it comes back, it goes in the basket, and the order rings in at the till already tagged with the table. Items, prices and modifier rules still come live from each vendor's Square catalogue, and where a menu spans venues in different Square accounts, the venue that takes the payment is still the one you named on the menu's Venues tab under Money goes to. That part has not changed. Search just stopped hiding half the menu.

Menu search moved next to the basket

On 24 September we moved the search button on the guest table-ordering menu down beside the basket, so it sits in thumb reach on a phone rather than at the top of a long scroll. We had it wrong for a while: the control was furthest from the thumb at exactly the moment a guest is holding the phone one-handed with a drink in the other, and the results were worse than the position. A search for something like a vegan option returned one flat list, so a vegan main sat directly above a smaller portion for a child with nothing to say which part of the question each line was answering. Guests scrolled, gave up and asked a server, which is fine once and expensive on a full Friday. Searching now accepts a sentence. Type two kids and someone vegan and the results come back in groups, each headed by the request it answers, with dietary caveats sitting under the request they qualify rather than piled at the bottom of the page.

On a Friday at 19:40, a party of six passes one phone round the table. One person types the whole order problem in a sentence instead of running three separate searches, reads the group headed for the two children, the group headed for the vegan, and adds from each without leaving the menu. The items and the caveats come from the same Menus data your team already maintains, including the Modifiers and Modifier Groups tabs we added to the Menus page in June, so a swap that makes a dish vegan is read from the modifier rather than typed into a description and forgotten. Nothing changes at checkout: the basket is where it was, and gift cards are still accepted at table-ordering checkout, several on one order. You will find it in Payments, on the guest-facing table-ordering menu, on any phone. Nothing to switch on. Two things we are watching: sentences with more than three requests in them, and how the groups behave on a menu with several hundred items and heavy modifier use. If yours is one of those, tell support and we will look at the search logs for your venue.

Bank checks on card payments

On 26 September we put 3-D Secure in front of every card payment in the ordering app, so the guest who scans the table code, builds a basket from your live Square catalogue and taps pay now gets the bank's own check before the charge goes through. Before this, a card that the issuing bank wanted to challenge simply did not go through at checkout, and the guest was left holding a phone with a basket on it and no way forward. That is on us. The worse half was the venue whose card payments were not enabled yet: the checkout failed without saying why, so the guest had no idea whether money had left their account. The copy now says it outright, 'You have not been charged', and tells them to pay with the team instead. Apple Pay and Google Pay are unchanged, because they carry the bank's check already.

The order of events at checkout is: the total is recalculated from your own menu data, the bank's check runs, then Square takes the card. Stampede still never touches raw card numbers. On a Friday at 8:40pm, a party of six splitting a shared basket on one table code used to mean one person's card quietly failing and a server walking over to sort it; now that card gets challenged, cleared and charged on the guest's phone, and the order rings in at the till tagged to the table like the other five. If your Square connection is live, the check is part of card checkout in the ordering app and there is nothing to switch on. If card payments are not enabled on your venue yet, guests will see the honest message rather than a dead button, and your team takes the payment on the Square Terminal as usual.

Know your customer, now a report

Shipped 27 September. There is a new Customers group in the sidebar, holding Search and Know your customer, and the Know your customer report inside it shows when guests order by day and hour, what they spend, average basket size, how long they stay on the Wi-Fi and which channels their bookings came through. We had the pieces before and kept them in separate rooms. Wi-Fi visits sat behind the Wi-Fi reporting page, which we refactored on 29 July along with captive reports. Covers and the online, walk-in, Google and direct source split sat in the bookings report. Spend sat in Square. Booking history landed on the customer profile on 3 June with the venue shown per row, which helped, but if you wanted to know whether your Friday nine o'clock crowd spends more than your Friday six o'clock crowd you were exporting two CSVs and doing the join yourself in a spreadsheet. That is the complaint we were answering, and it was a fair one.

Open Customers in the sidebar, pick Know your customer, set your date range, and read the day and hour grid against spend and basket size. Say Thursday 18:00 fills steadily with tables of two and four, and the hour after it carries a higher basket. That tells you something specific about where your Thursday kitchen hours and your next Thursday campaign should go, and the booking channel split tells you whether those covers came through your own online page or through Google. Two honest limits. It reads from Square orders, so it is live for Square-connected venues and the spend columns depend on orders going through that connection. And like the rest of reporting it is a dependable daily read rather than a live ticker, with the heavier numbers rolled up in the background. The Wi-Fi stay figure comes from the same sign-in that already counts the visit on the guest profile, so this is not a new thing to set up, it is the data you have been collecting since the welcome screen went live, finally sitting in one table. You will find it under Customers, beside Search.

Customers search rebuilt

On 27 September we shipped a rebuilt Customers list. The table now carries opt-ins, tags, join date and last seen as columns you can read without opening anything, and there are filters for venue, tag and date sitting above it. The part we got wrong for a long time is the bit we have just fixed: the summary figures at the top of the list ignored whatever you had filtered to, so you would narrow down to one venue and one tag, then read a count that still described your entire book. People quite reasonably stopped trusting the number. Filters now drive the figures, so the count you are looking at is the count of the guests you are looking at. Clicking a row opens that guest's card, and Customers in the sidebar expands in place rather than throwing you to a separate screen, which is the same nav-v4 shell behaviour we rolled out across Connect in July.

The practical version: it is Thursday at four, you have a party of 10 booked in for Saturday under a name you half recognise, and you want to know before service whether they are regulars and whether you are allowed to email them. Filter Customers to that venue, search the name, read last seen and the opt-in columns in the row, click through to the guest card if you need the full history of bookings, visits and reviews. No cross-referencing a spreadsheet against a booking diary. It is the same filter behaviour marketers want when they are sizing a tag before turning it into a segment, which is why the figures had to start obeying the filters first. You will find it under Customers in the left sidebar, it is part of Guest Profiles, and like everything else in reporting you only see the venues your team runs.

Know your customer, rebuilt

Know your customer, in Analytics and reports, now splits returning guests from new ones and sorts the room into regulars, occasionals and first-timers, each with their usual day and their usual order. Underneath sit the new guest sections, a visit frequency chart that shows what share of spend each group accounts for, a best guests table, and a customer profile sheet that opens from any row. We had this scattered for a long time and it was our fault: new versus returning lived in the Wi-Fi reporting, the VIP, regular and occasional split lived in the bookings report, and visits, last visit and total spend lived on one guest profile at a time. Three screens, and still no straight answer to the question a manager actually asks, which is who used to come in every week and has stopped.

Now you pick a period, read the guest sections, and click a name to open the customer profile sheet with total spent, total visits, last visit, member since and the thirty day visit chart. Regulars going quiet are flagged in the list rather than left for you to spot. On a Thursday at 18:40, with a table of 6 booked in for 19:30 under a name you half recognise, that sheet tells you it is a regular, that Thursday is their usual day, and what they usually order, before they are through the door. It went live on 27 September for venue managers, under Analytics and reports. Two honest limits: spend only adds up where payments are connected, and spotting a lapsed regular does not message them, so to act on the group you still build an audience and target it from marketing.

Kitchen notes on each dish

Guests ordering on the v2 checkout can now add a note to each dish, up to 140 characters, saved against the order and carried through to the kitchen ticket. We got half of this in June. The STA-4459 work gave guests full modifier selection, medium, no onions, extra cheese, and gave hosts the order itemised as base plus each modifier plus total in every order view, including the live Square order dialog. What it did not give them was anywhere to put a sentence. If the Square catalogue had no modifier group for it, the guest could not say it, and the kitchen never heard about it. Allergy wording, sauce on the side, one of the four without chilli: all of that was arriving by phone call or not at all.

The note now attaches to the dish rather than the order. When a guest has more than one of the same dish in the basket, they choose whether the note applies to all of them or to Just one, and Just one splits the line, so three sea bass become a line of two and a line of one with the note on it. Take a party of 8 pre-ordering against a menu attached to their booking type for 19:30 on a Saturday. One of them types "no cream, allergy" against a single starter. The pass sees that starter on its own ticket line, not a paragraph at the foot of an eight cover order that someone has to read twice during the 19:30 push. It is live on the v2 checkout now, for pre-orders taken at booking and for order and pay at the table, with nothing to turn on.

Texts now show on the order

Open an order from the live table view and you'll find a Texts section on the order detail, listing every message the guest was sent about that order: the exact wording, the time it went, the number it went to, the delivery status and what it cost. Before 30 September this was the gap we were least proud of. A guest would say they never got anything, and the member of staff on the floor had no way to check. They could see the order, the items, the running total and the state, but the texts lived somewhere the person actually being asked the question could not reach. So the answer was a shrug, or a resend, or a guess. Food halls were worse again, because each counter sends its own text and nobody could tell whether the guest had received three messages, one, or none.

Now it's a tap. A party of six orders across three counters at 19:40, one of them insists nothing arrived, and you open the order and see one row per counter with the time and status against each. If a number was mistyped at the till, it's there in the row. If it sent and the guest's phone was in a coat pocket, that's there too, with the wording you can read back to them. It sits in Payments, on the order detail itself, next to the items. No separate messaging screen, no asking the manager to log in to something else.