Point of Sale

The kitchen display

The screen a prep station stands at: every course fired from the terminal, aged by colour, moved along with Start, Ready and Served.

Last updated

Who this is for: kitchen and bar staff, Manager, Owner — requires pos.kds.read. Where: Point of Sale → Kitchen Display

When a server fires a course on the terminal, it has to reach the person who cooks it. The kitchen display is that screen — mounted at the pass, showing what this station owes, in the order it was asked for, with how long it has been waiting.

It invents nothing. Every ticket on it is a course the terminal fired, and every button moves the same ticket the terminal is reading.

The Kitchen Display for The Garden Café with the station filter set to all stations, an Active and a Served tab, a colour legend reading on time under 5 min, due 5 to 10 min and late over 10 min, and the empty state

A quiet pass. The legend across the top is the whole timing contract — the thresholds come from the outlet, not from this screen.

Point it at a station#

Outlet chooses which outlet's pass you are standing at. Only outlets that actually fire courses appear — restaurants, bars, cafés and room service. A shop or a spa has nothing to send to a kitchen.

Station narrows to one prep station — grill, cold larder, bar — or shows all of them. A wall-mounted screen is normally pinned to one station so the people at it see only their own work.

Tip

A display pointed at a bare /pos/kitchen opens on Active with no query string. That is the URL to put on a wall-mounted screen: it survives a reload and always comes back to the working view.

Work a ticket#

Each card is one fired course, carrying the course number, where it is going — a table, a bar tab, a room-service order or an event — the items on it, and its age counting up in minutes and seconds.

A ticket moves through four states, and the button always names the state you are moving it to:

State Button Means
Queued Start Fired, nobody has picked it up
Preparing Ready Somebody is cooking it
Ready Served Plated and waiting to go out
Served — Gone to the table

The terminal sees each move as it happens, so a server can tell a guest where their food is without walking to the kitchen.

Read the colour#

Colour is age, against the timing the outlet sets:

  • On time — under the first threshold
  • Due — between the two
  • Late — past the second

The legend across the top always states the actual minutes in force, because they are per-outlet: a fine-dining kitchen and a café do not owe the same speed. Change them under Settings → Outlets, and this screen and its legend both follow.

Active and served#

Active is the working view — everything not yet served. Served keeps what the station has sent out for the rest of the day, which is what you look at when a table says a course never arrived.

These are two faces of one pass rather than two screens, so switching is a tab, and the day's served tickets clear themselves.

When there is nothing to display#

"No outlets fire to a kitchen" means this property has no restaurant, bar, café or room-service outlet yet — create one under Settings → Outlets. "Nothing on the pass" means the outlet exists and the terminal has not fired anything to this station.

What's next#