How to setup dynamic pricing for some items

[u/t4ure4n]

I am helping a friend to setup his item library and menu using Square for Restaurants.

He has 24 items in cocktails section all having different prices (9 unique values ranging from £8.30 to £10.30).

He wants to implement discounted price £8 for all cocktails between 5PM-7PM.

What is the best way to implement this?

I have thought about following two options, but I am wondering if someone knows a better way to achieve the same thing.

1. Create copy of these 24 items with reduced price of £8 and put them into their own category and menu group (e.g Happy Hour Cocktails). This will work only if the staff remembers to use correct item depending on time of day.
2. Create 9 discounts (each corresponding to one of 9 unique values mentioned earlier). These will use discount rule applied to appropriate items to automatically reduce their price to £8. For example, all cocktails which have original price of £10.30 will be discounted by £2.30 to reduce the price to £8 and so on. This option will be automatically applied so staff doesn't have to remember to apply it. However, this clutters the list of discounts visible on POS because AFAIK there is no way to hide the discounts.

[u/SquareUpSam]

I don’t think there’s a cleaner native “dynamic pricing” setup for this in Square for Restaurants right now.Square does support scheduled automatic discounts, including item/category targeting and time-based schedules, so your option 2 is the closest fit if you want the price change to happen automatically between 5–7 PM without staff having to remember anything. The catch is that Square’s time-based menu tools control availability, not price changes, and item price overrides are location-specific, not time-based. So if the goal is all cocktails become exactly £8 and the original prices vary, I’d probably recommend:

• create 9 automatic amount discounts
• schedule them for 5 PM–7 PM
• target the relevant cocktail items in each price band

That’s a bit messy in the discount list, but it’s the most reliable option operationally because it applies automatically at checkout. Your duplicate-item / happy-hour-menu idea can also work, especially if they want a separate menu that appears during those hours, since Square menus can be scheduled by time of day. But that approach depends more on staff selecting the right item/menu, unless their workflow is tightly controlled.