Digital Menu Boards: Design, Schedule & Display Your Menu

Menu Boards turn any connected screen into a branded, always-current digital menu. Instead of printing and reprinting laminated boards every time a price or item changes, you design your boards once in the NX Portal, pull items and pricing straight from your live menu, and push them to any POS device running in Menu Board mode. Change a price in your menu and the board reflects it — no reprints, no ladders, no stickers.

This guide covers the whole workflow: building a board on the canvas, controlling how and when it displays, and assigning it to a physical screen.

🧭 Overview 

A Menu Board is a designed display made up of one or more pages. Each page is a canvas you lay out with menu content and design elements. Boards live in the NX Portal under Menus → Menu Boards, and are pushed to screens by putting a POS device into Menu Board mode and assigning boards to it.

Two ideas are worth understanding up front:

Boards pull from your live menu. When you drop a Category List or a Menu Item onto the canvas, it reads item names, descriptions, and prices directly from your configured menu. Update an item under Menus → Items and every board showing it updates automatically. You are designing a layout, not retyping your menu.

One device can drive several screens, and screens can rotate through several boards. A single POS device can be assigned multiple boards, and a board can hold multiple pages that cycle as a slideshow. This lets you run a breakfast board that swaps to lunch automatically, or spread a long menu across two or three screens on the wall.

🎨 Step 1: Build a Board in the Portal

Go to Menus → Menu Boards and create a new board (or open an existing one to edit).

Name it and set it Active

At the top of the editor, give the board a clear, recognizable name (for example, Snacks & Shares or Burgers & Sandwiches) — this is how you'll find and assign it later. Use the Active toggle to control whether the board is live. Leave it off while you're still designing; turn it on when it's ready to display.

The Generate with AI button will lay out a starter board for you automatically, which you can then refine — a fast way to get a first draft rather than building from a blank canvas.

Work with pages

A board starts with Page 1. Use the ＋ button next to the page tab to add more pages, and the pencil/duplicate icons to rename or copy a page. Multiple pages cycle automatically as a slideshow using the slide duration and transition you set in Board Settings (below). Use extra pages when a category is too long for one screen, or to rotate promotional content.

➡️ Learn More: Digital Menu Boards: Adding Additional Pages

Add content and design elements

The Add to Canvas panel on the left holds everything you can place on a page:

• Text — free-form text for titles, taglines, disclaimers, or allergen notes.
• Image — logos, food photography, or promotional graphics.
• Shape — lines, rectangles, and circles for dividers, panels, and visual structure.
• Menu Item — pins one specific menu item (name, description, price) to the canvas. Best for featuring a single hero item or special.
• Category List — pulls an entire menu category and renders it as a vertical list of items with prices. This is the workhorse element for most boards.
• Category Tiles — the same category content presented as a grid of tiles rather than a list, for a more visual, photo-forward layout.

Position and size elements

Click any element to select it. Drag it to move; drag the corner handles to resize. The toolbar along the bottom of the canvas shows the selected element's X / Y position and W / H size as percentages, so you can place things precisely. Arrow keys nudge a selected element (hold Shift for larger steps), and Delete removes it. The layering buttons (bring to front, forward, backward, send to back) control which elements sit on top when they overlap.

The canvas toolbar also gives you a Snap toggle for aligning elements to a grid, a zoom control for working in detail, and background options: a solid BG color, or a BG Image with fit mode (e.g., Cover) and an opacity slider so photography sits softly behind your text.

Style a Category List

The Category List is the most configurable element, and it's where most of a board's polish comes from. Select one to open its settings on the right:

• Category — choose which menu category feeds the list (e.g., Burger & Sandwiches). Every item in that category flows in automatically.
• Layout — switch between List (stacked rows) and Tiles (grid).
• Max items — cap how many items display (e.g., 8), so a long category doesn't overflow the screen. Pair a high-count category with multiple pages or a lower max to keep it readable.
• Item name styling — set the name font size, font family (e.g., Poppins), bold/italic style, and text alignment (left / center / right).
• Price — choose which price to show (Default price, or a specific price point if your items use them), and style the price independently with its own font size, font, and bold/italic.
• Heading — toggle Show heading to display the category title above the list, and control its font size, style, and font. This is the "Burger & Sandwiches" banner you see at the top of a list.

Matching the fonts (Poppins, in these examples) and styles across your boards keeps everything on-brand and consistent from screen to screen.

Click Save when the layout is done.

⚙️ Step 2: Set Display Behavior (Board Settings)

Click on an empty area of the canvas (with no element selected) to open Board Settings on the right. These control how and when the finished board plays on a screen.

• Priority — the board's order in the rotation when a device is assigned more than one board. Lower numbers play first.
• Slide duration (sec) — how long each page/slide stays on screen before advancing (e.g., 15 sec). Long enough to read, short enough to keep moving.
• Transition — the animation between slides (e.g., Fade).
• Orientation — Landscape or Portrait. Match this to how the physical screen is mounted, or your layout will be cropped or letterboxed.
• Schedule (time ranges) — controls when the board is allowed to display. Leave it empty to always show. Add one or more time ranges to show the board only during those windows — this is how you run a breakfast board that hands off to lunch, or a happy-hour board that appears only from 4–6 PM. Boards outside their scheduled window simply drop out of the rotation until their time comes.

Together, Priority + Schedule let you run a whole daypart-aware playlist on one screen: the system shows whichever active boards are in-window, in priority order, cycling their pages on the slide duration you set.

📺 Step 3: Assign the Board to a Screen

A board only appears once you point a physical device at it. This happens under Devices → POS Devices.

1. Open the POS device connected to the screen you want to use (e.g., Menu Board 1).
2. Scroll to Device Mode. Set both:
   • Default Mode to Menu board — this is what the station launches into after a reboot.
   • Current Mode to Menu board — this switches the device to the menu board display right now.
3. In the Menu Boards section, use the ＋ button to add a Display Board row, then choose the board you built (e.g., Burgers & Sandwiches) from the dropdown.
4. If the device drives more than one connected screen, add a row for each. The order of the rows determines the display number — the first row is display 1, the second is display 2, and so on. Drag the handle to reorder; use the ✕ to remove a row.
5. Click Save.

The screen will switch to your menu board. Because the mode is set remotely from the portal, you can change what's on any screen in the restaurant without touching the hardware.

💡 Light/Dark display mode is separate from device mode. A device in Menu Board mode still honors its own Light/Dark (or scheduled Dark Mode) setting, which you can configure independently on the same POS device page.

✅ Putting It Together

A typical rollout looks like this: build one board per menu section (Snacks & Shares, Burgers & Sandwiches, and so on), style each Category List to match your brand fonts, set orientation to match your screens, and add schedules if any board is daypart-specific. Mark each finished board Active. Then, on the POS device driving each screen, set the mode to Menu board and assign the right board(s) in the order you want them to display. From then on, your boards stay in sync with your live menu automatically — a price change under Menus → Items shows up on the wall on the next refresh.

Quick reference

Need additional help? Contact your NX Support Partner by going to Help & Support in the NX Portal.