Call waiter and request bill

What this covers

The two buttons guests get on their phone at the table, and how your team answers them. Needs the Customer Interaction feature, plus the switch on the Menu tab of Public Pages Design.

What the guest gets

Two one-tap buttons on the at-table menu:

• Call waiter — they need something.
• Request bill — they are ready to pay.

No catching an eye, no waving, no waiting for someone to walk past. For guests this is often the single most appreciated part of the whole system.

What your team gets

The request appears immediately in the notification drawer — the bell in the top bar — with the table it came from. See The notification drawer.

Requests are stored, not just flashed. One raised while a tablet was asleep, or while the person watching was in the cellar, is still waiting when someone looks. Nothing is lost because nobody happened to be at the screen.

Turning them on

Property Settings → Public Pages Design → Menu: Allow Interactions (Summon Waiter & Request Bill) — "Guests can call a waiter or request the bill from their phone. Requires a table QR code."

They only appear when the guest scanned a table code. Someone reading your menu from a poster has no table to call from.

You can also colour the two buttons separately to fit your menu design — see Designing your menu page.

Making it work on the floor

The technology is trivial; the etiquette is what matters:

• Decide who watches the bell, on every shift.
• Acknowledge quickly, even if you cannot go immediately. Marking it seen tells your colleagues it is handled.
• Answer faster than you would notice a raised hand. A guest who taps a button and waits four minutes concludes the button does not work — and goes back to waving, having lost faith in it.
• Do not treat it as a queue to work through. A bill request from a table with their coats on is more urgent than one from a table on their starters.

If you are not ready for it

Leave the switch off. A button nobody answers is worse for a guest than no button, because they have already decided you were told.