The Orders board
What this covers
The screen your kitchen and floor work from. Everyone who can view bookings can see it.
Find it at Orders in the left-hand menu.
What it shows
Live Orders — every table with an open session, its orders, and every item on them, with quantity, price, the guest's chosen options and any note they left. When it is quiet it says No active orders.
It updates the instant an order is placed. Nobody needs to refresh anything.
Two levels of status
This is the part worth learning, because it is what lets a kitchen work sensibly.
The order
Open → Confirmed → Preparing → Served, plus Cancelled.
Each item
Pending → Preparing → Served, plus Cancelled.
So you can fire the starters while the mains wait — mark two items preparing and leave the rest pending.
The two levels keep each other in step
You do not have to manage both by hand:
- Move the whole order and every item follows it. Marking an order Preparing marks all its items preparing.
- Move individual items and the order keeps up on its own. The first item you start moves the order to Preparing; once every item is served, the order becomes Served; if every item is cancelled, so is the order.
The order never goes backwards, and an order already served or cancelled stays put. So you can work whichever way suits the station — the whole ticket on a small menu, item by item on a busy pass — and the board stays truthful either way.
The guest sees it too
Every status change is pushed to the guest's phone. Marking items as you actually cook them is worth the seconds: it is the difference between a guest wondering whether the order arrived and one who can see it is being made.
Closing a table
When the party leaves, close the session from the board. See Table sessions.
Running it well
- One screen, one owner. Decide who watches it. An unwatched board is the only real way this feature fails.
- Mark preparing when you start, not when you finish. That is what the guest's phone is showing.
- Cancel items rather than ignoring them if you are out of something, and tell the table.
- Keep it in landscape on a tablet, somewhere everyone passes.