ℹ️ Note: requires a Toast POS integration.
With a Toast integration, orders from your Owner website go into Toast through Otter and print on your Toast setup. Closing an order in Owner is what tells your guest it's ready, and stock counts only travel one way.
What you need from Toast
Your Toast account needs Toast Partner Connect to connect to Owner, or to any other third party. Toast charges for that separately.
You don't need Toast Online Ordering. That's a separate Toast product for running your own ordering website, and it costs extra. If that's the only reason you're paying for it, you can cancel it and your Owner integration keeps working.
Where you do what
Your menu lives in Toast. Almost everything else lives in Owner.
What you want to do | Where you do it |
Add or edit items, prices and options | Toast |
86 an item or option | Toast |
Menu photos | Toast |
Printers and prep stations | Toast |
Category availability hours and descriptions | Owner |
Your opening hours and holidays | Owner |
Turn online ordering off | Owner |
Prep time and throttling | Owner |
Delivery settings | Owner |
Refunds and extra charges | Owner |
Coupons, loyalty and gift cards | Owner |
Marketing campaigns | Owner |
Manage your guest list | Owner |
Sales reporting | Toast or Owner |
ℹ️ Note: Toast's own coupons, loyalty and gift cards don't work on online orders. Owner's do, so use those instead.
Two more worth knowing. You can run more than one menu, as long as their availability times don't overlap. And you can link to Toast reservations from your Owner website, though they can't be built into the page itself.
Adding new items and categories
Price changes and option edits you make in Toast reach your Owner menu on their own. Adding something new does not, because Toast copies items between menus but not whole categories.
So when you add a new item, add a new category, or rename a category, do it on your in-house menu and on your Owner / Otter menu in Toast.
⚠️ An item added to only one of the two menus will not reach your guests. Add it to both.
Closing an order and notifying your guest
Closing an order in Owner is the only action that texts your guest to say their order is ready. Closing the same order in Toast does reach Owner, and the order moves to completed, but it does not send that text.
When your guest and any delivery driver arrive is driven by the prep time you set in Owner. Your staff don't need to do anything on the Toast tablet for the guest to be notified.
⚠️ Staff often assume they have to close the order on the Toast tablet for the guest to hear anything. They don't. The ready notification comes entirely from the order status and prep time in Owner.
How stock counts behave
Stock counts travel one way, from Owner to Toast. When an order is placed on Owner it reduces the count of that item in Toast, and once the count reaches 0 the item shows as out of stock.
It doesn't work in reverse. Owner can't read your Toast counts, so if Toast has 5 bagels left and a guest orders 10 on Owner, Owner accepts the order. One exception: numbers never travel back from Toast, but marking an item unavailable (86) in Toast does reach Owner straight away.
⚠️ This is not full stock management. Because Owner only reduces the count in Toast and never reads it back, it cannot stop you overselling an item.