me&u Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs the menu behind your QR codes (formerly Mr Yum)

People land on this page two ways: searching “me&u virtual assistant” or searching “mr yum virtual assistant”, and both searches mean the same thing. Mr Yum and me&u merged in an all-stock deal completed in late 2023 and run as me&u now, 6,000+ venues across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US, more than $2 billion a year in dining transactions, and the default QR ordering name on Australian pub tables and cafe counters. Whichever name is printed on your table talkers, the problem underneath is identical. The QR codes did their job and moved the ordering online, and now there’s a whole second menu living in a dashboard, and the person keeping it honest is you, between a supplier call and a lunch rush.

Because here is the thing nobody mentions at the demo: QR ordering doesn’t reduce menu admin, it doubles the stakes of it. On a paper menu, a wrong price gets caught by a human at the till. On me&u, a wrong price charges wrong all day, a sold-out dish takes orders until someone pulls it, and a special that never got loaded simply doesn’t exist as far as your guests are concerned. The software is doing its job. It just needs someone whose job is the software.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your me&u

Morning, before the doors open: the menu gets its pass. Yesterday’s 86ed items checked (me&u’s sold out today status returns them by itself, anything parked as unavailable needs a human call) so lunch doesn’t start half empty, prices reconciled against the POS so the app and the till agree to the cent, today’s specials built with a photo and a description that sells rather than a name in grey text, and anything the kitchen has permanently retired actually removed instead of hanging around confusing guests. Section order gets a look too, because on a phone screen the second scroll is where items go to die, and the money dishes belong up top.

Then service coverage, which is the task that pays for the rest. When the kitchen 86es the barramundi at 12:40, me&u does not know. Orders keep landing at the pass, dockets keep printing, and someone ends up walking to table 14 to apologise. Your VA watches the 86 channel (a group chat, a message from the pass, whatever your venue already uses) during the service windows you agree, snoozes the item in the dashboard within minutes, and swaps out any upsell prompt that was pushing the dead dish. Manila runs on Australian business hours at DotVA, so lunch service in Melbourne is mid-afternoon at their desk, not the middle of the night.

Then the selling machinery. me&u’s add-on and upsell prompts are quietly one of the highest-leverage settings in the platform, and in most venues they get configured once at onboarding and never touched again. The VA keeps them current: chips and aioli attached to the burgers, a second-round prompt on the drinks list, desserts suggested against mains that actually pair, modifier prices accurate, and the prompts rotated when the menu changes rather than left advertising last season’s special.

Scheduling is the same story. Happy hour pricing that turns on at 4:00 and off at 6:00 without a human remembering. Breakfast, lunch and dinner menus that switch themselves at the times you set. Public holiday settings prepared before the day, live on the day, and off again after, with the surcharge percentage itself being your call, not the VA’s. Promo codes built for each campaign, tested on a real phone before the post goes out, and expired when the offer ends so a code from March isn’t still shaving margin in July.

And the weekly rhythm on top. A sync check against the POS, because me&u rides on that integration (Lightspeed, SwiftPOS, H&L and friends, often via Doshii) and an item renamed or rebuilt at the till can silently drop off the app or stop printing where the kitchen expects. A pull of the sales and item-performance reports, condensed into a short flagged summary: which items moved, which never get tapped, what the upsell prompts converted, where average order value is heading. And a guest-data export worked into your marketing list, deduplicated and tidy, because every QR order leaves contact details behind and most venues let that database rot.

If you run more than one venue, the same VA runs the same rhythm across the group from one set of logins, which is where the leverage really shows. A group-wide price rise that used to mean a manager at each site poking at a dashboard on a Tuesday night becomes one person’s Thursday morning, applied consistently, checked against each till, and confirmed back to you in a single message. Menu changes roll out to every site on the same day instead of whenever each venue manager gets to it, and the weekly report reads across sites, so you can see that the wagyu burger that flies in Richmond is being scrolled straight past in Geelong.

The honest bit

Some things me&u will not do for you, no matter who is driving the dashboard, and they’re worth saying plainly.

It will not 86 anything on its own initiative. Some POS integrations do sync availability, so an item marked sold out at the till can drop off the app automatically, and if yours supports that it is worth switching on. But plenty of venues never wire that up, stock knowledge still starts in the kitchen’s head, and the gap between “we’re out” at the pass and gone from the app is exactly as long as it takes a human to act somewhere. That gap is the single best argument for having a person on the dashboard during service, and it’s also the task’s hard edge: a VA can only snooze what the kitchen tells them about, so the 86 habit at the pass has to exist first.

The visual menu only works if you feed it. Photographed items outsell grey placeholders, that was Mr Yum’s founding insight, but me&u does not take the photos. The VA can crop, upload, tag and flag the gaps; the actual shots come from your phone, your staff or a photographer you hire once a season. The realistic arrangement is a standing note in the weekly summary listing the top sellers still running bare, so someone at the venue snaps them in good light on a quiet Tuesday and the VA does the rest.

The merger left homework in a lot of venues. If your setup dates back to the Mr Yum days, there is usually drift nobody has owned since: items priced before two cost rises, retired dishes still live, prompts pushing a special from a previous menu, and printed QR collateral referencing the old brand. None of it is hard to fix, but it is exactly the kind of work that never wins the daily triage in a venue, which is why it makes the ideal first-week audit for the VA rather than another thing on your list.

The per-order economics are yours to weigh. me&u charges venues fees on orders that flow through it, which is fine when QR ordering is saving you a floor wage and lifting order values, and worth an honest look if you’re pushing every transaction through it out of habit. A VA can pull the reports that make that decision visible. The decision is a founder’s.

And QR ordering changes your service style rather than replacing your floor. Tables still need to be watched, drinks still need to be run, and a percentage of guests will always want a human to order from. me&u handles the transaction. Hospitality is still yours to do.

What stays with you

Prices, and the decision to move them. Surcharge percentages on public holidays and weekends, which have Australian Consumer Law display requirements attached and are an owner’s call to set. Allergen and dietary claims: the VA drafts descriptions, but a “gluten free” tag is a food-safety statement, so anything dietary gets your sign-off before it goes live. Refunds and comping, which sit behind the payments side the VA’s login doesn’t open. Payout and bank details, billing and fee settings, all owner-level in the dashboard by structure. And anything touching alcohol service: the app takes the drink order, but RSA obligations and your liquor licence live on the floor with your staff, and no dashboard setting changes that.

The clean way to think about it: the VA runs the menu, the schedule, the reports and the database. Money settings, legal claims and service judgement stay in the building.

What it costs and where to start

me&u admin sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, usually 10-15 hours a week for a single venue, which lands around $500-1,100 a month. Multi-venue groups scale the hours rather than the rate, and most venues fold the me&u work in with menu and website updates, social scheduling or a monthly newsletter built off those guest-data exports, so the dashboard admin rides along with marketing work you already need done.

Placement takes 7-10 business days. The first 5-7 days are supervised inside your me&u dashboard before any solo work: the menu audit first (especially if yours dates back to the Mr Yum era), then snoozing coverage, then scheduling and reporting once the daily pass is reliable. There’s a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, a $500 refundable deposit that credits to your first month, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

The wider picture for venues is on the hospitality page, and the VA cost guide breaks down the full pricing model. Or skip ahead and book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring your me&u dashboard login and last week’s item report; the dead items and the un-photographed top sellers will make the case faster than we can.