Taking the printed card away changes more than a printing bill. It changes how fast a price can move, what you can say about an allergen, whether a dish gets a photograph, and how the room feels to somebody who came out for dinner rather than to look at a phone. All four are worth being honest about, because the first is the reason to do it and the last is the reason some rooms stopped.
Prices and sold-out dishes stop being an afternoon
This is the whole economic case. A price rise, a special or a dish that ran out becomes an edit that is live before you have put the phone down, across every table at once. Rooms that change a menu weekly capture nearly all of the value; a room with a fixed card that has not moved in two years captures very little and should say so rather than buying it anyway.
Allergens get easier and the responsibility does not move
An electronic menu can carry full allergen detail per dish without turning the card into a wall of small print, which is better than a footnote and a folder behind the bar. What it does not change is who is responsible for that detail being right. If anything, the ease of editing makes a stale entry likelier, so it needs the same check the printed one had.
App, tablet or a page in the browser
A page that opens from a code in the browser asks nothing of the guest and works on every phone. A digital menu app is a download between a hungry person and their dinner, and it is the version most often abandoned. A tablet menu handed to the table is a third option with real costs: charging, cleaning, breakage and theft, in exchange for a bigger screen and photographs that sell.
What the room loses, and how to give it back
Some guests dislike it, particularly older ones and anyone who came out to be away from a screen. A table where four people are looking at phones reads differently from one passing a card around. The rooms that handle this well keep a small stack of paper menus and offer one without making it a negotiation, and they lose nothing by doing so, because the saving comes from stopping the reprint run rather than from having no paper at all.
Questions people ask about electronic menus for restaurants
Does an electronic menu have to be an app?
No, and it is better if it is not. A page opened from a code works on every phone made in the last decade and needs no download, no account and no permission prompt.
What does going digital save against printing?
The comparison is the cards you print once against the menus you reprint at every change. The sheet on this site does that sum from your own figures; on its worked example the codes cost £20.40 and the printing they replace is £336.00 a year.
Are tablet menus worth it?
In rooms selling a long list of dishes with photographs, sometimes. Against that, budget for charging, cleaning, breakage and the occasional one that walks. Most rooms find the guest's own phone is the cheaper screen.