The terminal: opening and closing checks

Who this is for: Owner, Manager, and outlet staff given a role that carries it — opening a check needs pos.check.open, firing needs pos.check.fire, settling needs pos.settle. Where: Point of Sale → Terminal

The terminal is one shift, in one screen: open a check, add items, fire the course, settle it. Open checks down the left, the selected check on the right.

Before you start:

• The outlet picker only lists F&B outlets — restaurant, bar, cafe, room_service. A spa or a function space is worked from its own screen.
• Only fnb items appear as buttons. See outlets and catalog.
• To charge a check to a room, that room must have a guest in house.

One check, mid-service. The lines read (fired) because the course has gone to the kitchen; the total is computed from the lines, never stored.

Open a check#

1. Choose the outlet.
2. Select Open check.

The check appears in the list on the left and opens on the right, for two covers, with no lines. It is a table check — a bill in progress attached to nothing but the outlet until it is settled.

Add items to a check#

1. Select the check in the list on the left.
2. Select an item's button to add one of it.
3. Repeat for each item ordered.

Each press adds a line of quantity one; pressing the same button twice gives two lines rather than a line of two. The Total (incl. tax) re-computes as you go, and it is genuinely computed — the server adds up the live lines every time it is asked, so the number on the check and the number that reaches the folio cannot drift apart.

A new line is draft. Nothing has gone to the kitchen yet.

Fire the course#

1. Select Fire course.

Every draft line flips to fired, and a ticket is written for each prep station involved — the kitchen gets one, the bar gets another, each carrying only its own lines. The ticket is a snapshot: editing the check afterwards does not rewrite a ticket already on the pass.

Firing needs pos.check.fire, which is worth granting more widely than pos.check.void — the reverse of a fire is a void, and a void needs a reason and a separate permission.

Settle a check to a room folio#

This is the route that makes an outlet part of the hotel rather than a shop inside it.

1. Select Settle.
2. Choose Room folio (charge to room).
3. Type the room number.
4. Type the guest name.
5. Select Settle.

Both fields, every time. The name is not a courtesy — it is the second half of the check that stops a terminal being used to find out who is in a room.

The charge posts to that stay's guest folio as an incidental and the check closes. Open folios at the front desk and it is there, ready to be transferred, split or invoiced with everything else.

The whole route in one pass: open, add, fire, settle to the room — and the last frame is the Front Desk, not the terminal. That handoff is what makes this a PMS feature rather than a till.

Important

A wrong room and a wrong name fail identically. The refusal says only that the stay could not be verified; it never tells you that the room was right and the name wrong, or the reverse. So a guest who gives a room number they are not staying in gets the same answer as one who mistypes their own surname — ask for both again rather than reading anything into the message.

The name is matched loosely enough to be usable: a surname on its own is normally enough. The room number must be exact.

Settle a check as a direct payment#

For a walk-in who is not staying in the house.

1. Select Settle.
2. Leave the destination on Direct (walk-in payment).
3. Choose the payment method — cash, card or other.
4. If a drawer is open at this outlet, choose it under Cashier session.
5. Select Settle.

Step 4 is the one to build a habit around. A cash settle that is not attached to a drawer is still a real sale and still lands in the day's totals, but it will not be counted when that drawer is closed — so the drawer balances, the till does not, and nothing on any screen says why. See settlement and close.

Note

A card payment taken here is recorded, not authorised — there is no gateway in the loop at this seam. Treat the card total as a record of what the machine beside you did.

Settle a check to an event#

The third destination, Master account (event), posts the check to an event's master account instead of to a guest or to the drawer — the bar tab at a wedding, the coffee run during a conference. It needs the event to have a master account already open, which happens when the event is confirmed. See events and function spaces.

What the terminal does not do#

The screen is deliberately narrow, and several capabilities that exist in Nerve are not on it:

• No table map. A check is opened against the outlet, not against a table you pick.
• No split, merge or transfer between checks.
• No void or discount button. Voiding a line and discounting a line are real operations with their own permissions (pos.check.void, pos.check.discount) — a void always needs a reason, is never a deletion (the line stays on the check, struck through), and can require a step-up re-authentication where your organisation's step-up policy covers it — but neither has a control here.
• No kitchen display. Tickets are written when you fire; there is no screen in this section that shows them.
• No quantity or seat controls. One press, one line, seat zero, course one.

What's next#

• Settlement and close — the drawer these settles land in, and closing the day on top of them.
• Folios — where a charged-to-room check ends up.