Taking Orders & Sending to the Kitchen in Meztezz

If your floor is the part of the restaurant your guests live in, the billing screen is the part your staff live in. It’s where the order goes from “what can I get you?” to a printed ticket clipped to the kitchen pass. Get this rhythm right and the rest of the system — bills, reports, stock — follows quietly. Get it wrong and you’ll spend the evening apologising for the wrong dish at the wrong table.

This guide is an exhaustive walkthrough of how Meztezz takes an order, how items move from the cart to the kitchen, and what you can — and can’t — still change once a ticket is fired. It assumes you’ve already gone through Setting Up Masters and Tables & Reservations. If you haven’t, start with those — categories, items, stations and tables are all moving parts in this story.

💡 Where this lives in the app. The billing screen is the default landing screen of the Meztezz POS Terminal. You may have opened it directly, or arrived from the Tables screen by tapping a green (available) card. Either way, what you’re looking at is the same screen — the only difference is whether a table is pre-attached to the order.

The Walkthrough at a Glance

Part	What you’ll learn
1. Before You Take the First Order	Prerequisites — masters set up, permissions, what a fresh cart looks like.
2. Reading the Billing Screen	The four regions of the screen and what each is for.
3. Picking the Order Type	Dine In, Takeaway, Delivery (COD vs. Prepaid) — and why you must pick first. Plus how aggregator orders arrive as a separate channel.
4. Building the Cart	Tapping items, variants, addons, quantity, notes, and quick-instruction chips.
5. Editing the Cart Before You Send	What you can change while items are still unsent, including item-level discounts.
6. Holding an Order to Come Back To	F4 Recall — the “park this for now” workflow.
7. Sending to the Kitchen — The KOT	The headline action. F5 KOT vs. F6 Pay, what happens when the ticket fires.
8. One KOT per Station — How Routing Works	How items split across stations, what happens with no printer.
9. Adding More After the First KOT	Second-round KOTs, table state, and what carries forward.
10. Cancelling an Item After It’s Sent	Manager PIN, reasons, and stock implications.
11. Where the KOT Shows Up Beyond the Printer	Captain App, KDS, and other terminals.
12. Honest List of What Meztezz Doesn’t Do (Yet)	Limits we’d rather you know in advance.
13. A Few Habits That Save You Later	Small disciplines that pay back during a Saturday rush.

Part 1 — Before You Take the First Order

A POS is only as accurate as the data behind it. Before the first guest walks in, four things must be in place:

Prereq	Where it’s configured	Why it matters here
Menu items, categories	`More → Menu Management`	The billing screen can’t show items that don’t exist.
Stations	`Settings → Stations`	KOTs can’t route to stations that aren’t defined.
Tables (for dine-in)	The table grid on the Tables screen	Without tables you can still bill as Takeaway or Delivery, but the floor flow described in Tables & Reservations won’t work.
Printers and station-to-printer mapping	`Settings → Printer`	Without this, KOTs save to the database and appear on the KDS, but nothing physically prints in the kitchen.
User permissions	`Settings → Roles` (and `Settings → Users` to assign them)	Most actions in this guide (`kot:create`, `order:hold`, and the `discount:*` family for item discounts) are role-gated. Cancelling a sent item is gated by a manager PIN rather than a permission. Owners and Managers have everything; cashiers get the day-to-day subset.

If any of these is missing, the right moment to fix it is now, not mid-shift.

What “no order in progress” looks like

When nothing is open, the cart panel on the right is empty, the order-type chip at the top shows the default (usually Dine In), and the F6 action button reads Pay but is disabled. For dine-in and COD-delivery the KOT secondary button (F5) is present but stays disabled until the cart has at least one unsent item.

Part 2 — Reading the Billing Screen

The billing screen has four regions. Learn what each one is for and the rest of the guide will feel natural.

The left side is a paged grid of every active menu item. A collapsible category sidebar runs down the left edge of the grid; tap a category to filter, and parent categories drill down into their sub-categories (with a back button to step out). There’s a search box above the grid — typing two or three letters of an item name jumps straight to it, which is the fastest way to bill on a busy night.

Tapping any item — even a plain dish — opens the item modal rather than dropping straight into the cart. The modal is where you pick the variant, addons, quantity and instructions before adding the line. (More on this in Part 4.)

2.2 The Cart Panel — Right Side

The right side is your running order. Each line shows: item name, variant (if any), addons (if any) as small sub-lines, the quantity, the unit price, and the line total. A horizontal divider separates unsent items (still editable) from sent items (already on a KOT), so the cashier can tell at a glance what the kitchen has already seen.

Below the cart sits the live total — subtotal, taxes and charges (split out per your Settings → Billing & Tax config), and the grand total. The numbers update on every cart change. If you’ve applied a manual discount or there’s an offer running, those appear here as separate lines.

2.4 The Action Bar — Bottom Right

Three keys do most of the work, and each has a keyboard shortcut shown on the button:

Button	Key	What it does
Hold	`F3`	Parks the current order so the cashier can start something else; recallable later.
Recall	`F4`	Opens the list of held orders + bills with cancelled payments. Only appears when at least one such order exists.
KOT	`F5`	Fires a Kitchen Order Ticket for all unsent items in the cart. Doesn’t take payment.
Pay (label varies — see Part 7)	`F6`	The context-aware primary button. For Dine-In it opens the payment screen; for Takeaway / Delivery-Prepaid it fires the KOT and opens payment in one step; for Aggregator it just says “Send to Kitchen”.

The full keyboard map is in the on-screen help overlay — press F1 from the billing screen any time.

💡 F5 is the most important key in the building. On dine-in, the cashier should be hitting F5 the moment the captain finishes calling out items — not waiting until payment. The earlier the KOT lands in the kitchen, the faster the food reaches the table.

2.5 The KOT Display Panel

A separate side panel (toggleable, depending on screen size) lists every KOT generated on this terminal today — pending, preparing, ready, served, cancelled. It lets you keep an eye on each KOT’s status at a glance. (Re-printing a KOT happens on the KDS — see Part 7.4.) It’s described in detail in Part 7.

Part 3 — Picking the Order Type

3.1 The Three Order Types

The order-type picker offers three types. The picker sits in the billing header, just above the cart.

Type	When to use it	What changes downstream
Dine In	Guests are seated. A table is attached.	Table flips to occupied on first KOT; bill prints with table number; tax depends on your dine-in tax setup.
Takeaway	Guest takes the food away. No table.	KOT header marks “Takeaway”; bill format omits table; tax may follow your takeaway regime (often different from dine-in for GST).
Delivery	Sent out via your own staff.	Same as Takeaway in most respects, plus a sub-choice: COD (collect on delivery) or Prepaid (collect at billing time).

Aggregator orders are a separate channel, not a fourth pickable type. Orders arriving from Swiggy/Zomato/etc. come in through the Aggregator button in the billing header, which opens a pending-orders sheet. When you load one of those ingested orders, the F6 button reads “Send to Kitchen” — but you never pick “Aggregator” from the order-type picker yourself.

3.2 Why You Must Pick First

The order type controls a chain of downstream behaviour — which printer header to use, which tax rule to apply, whether stock counts toward dine-in or takeaway in your reports. Because of that, once you’ve fired the first KOT (the order is saved), the order type is locked. Before the first KOT you can still switch types freely; switching away from dine-in just clears any table you’d attached.

3.3 Delivery: COD vs. Prepaid

If you pick Delivery, a second dropdown asks whether payment is COD or Prepaid.

Prepaid Delivery — money first, food after. F6 reads “Pay & Send to Kitchen” — one combined action that fires the KOT and opens payment.
COD Delivery — KOT first, money when the rider returns. F6 reads “Pay” (you’ll fire the KOT separately with F5, the same way you would for dine-in).

Part 4 — Building the Cart

Tapping any menu item opens the item modal — even a plain dish with no variants or addons. The modal is where you set the variant, addons, quantity and any instructions, then tap Add to Cart to drop the line into the cart. A plain item simply shows an empty variant/addon section and a quantity stepper, so it’s a tap-then-add.

Add the same plain item a second time — same variant, no addons, no note — and Meztezz merges it onto the existing line and bumps the quantity rather than creating a duplicate cart line (good — keeps the kitchen ticket clean). Lines that carry addons or a note always get their own cart line.

4.2 Items With Variants

A variant is a size, portion or style choice — Half / Full, Small / Medium / Large, Veg / Non-Veg. When the item has variants configured, the modal shows the variant choices to pick from.

Inside the modal:

The default variant is pre-selected (the one you marked as default in Masters).
Exactly one variant can be picked per cart line — Meztezz doesn’t model “two sizes of the same dish on one line”.
Price updates live as you switch.

4.3 Items With Addons

An addon is something added on top — extra cheese, extra spicy, a side of raita. Inside the same modal, the addons appear as a single flat Add-ons checklist; you tick the ones the guest wants.

A few things worth knowing:

Each addon has its own price; the cart line shows the addon as a sub-line beneath the item.
You can pick as many addons as the guest wants.
The current build doesn’t enforce a maximum count — if an item has eight addons, the cashier could in principle tick all eight. Keep your addon lists short and curated.

4.4 Quantity

Set the quantity with the + / − stepper inside the item modal before you add, or adjust it later with the + / − buttons on the cart line. Quantities are whole numbers. Decimal quantities aren’t supported in the current build — for a dish you serve “by the kilo”, model it as separate variants (250g, 500g, 1kg) rather than trying to bill 0.5.

4.5 Notes and Quick-Instruction Chips

The item modal has an instructions section with two ways to attach a note to the line:

Quick chips — small one-tap buttons (No Onion, Less Spicy, Jain, Extra Spicy) that you configure once in settings. Tap to select the ones the guest asked for. The instruction text prints on the KOT on its own line beneath the item.
Free-text note — a text field for anything the chips don’t cover ("birthday — bring out with candle", "no ice", "guest is allergic to peanuts"). This also prints on the KOT.

Whatever you pick is combined into the line’s note. Once the item is in the cart you can re-open and edit that note from the cart line (tap the note, which shows a pencil icon, or choose Edit Notes in the line’s ⋮ menu).

💡 Set up your quick chips on Day 1. Five chips for your five most common requests will save your cashiers thousands of taps a month, and — more importantly — eliminate the “I told the captain less spicy and it came out spicy anyway” miscommunication. Configure them under Settings → KOT Instructions.

Part 5 — Editing the Cart Before You Send

While items are still unsent (sitting above the divider in the cart panel), the cart is completely yours. The kitchen hasn’t seen anything; nothing is committed to the database yet.

You can:

Change quantity — + / − on the cart line.
Edit the note — tap the note on the line (it shows a pencil icon), or choose Edit Notes from the line’s ⋮ menu, and retype.
Remove the line entirely — open the line’s ⋮ menu and tap Remove Item.

Any of these is instant. There’s no “save” step; the live total updates as you change things.

To change a variant or addons on a line, remove it and re-add it from the modal — there’s no in-place variant edit. (The same applies to sent items; see Part 10.3.) Item-level discounts and comps are covered in 5.1 below.

5.1 Item-Level Discounts

For “guest didn’t enjoy the soup, take it off” or “comp the dessert because they waited too long”, Meztezz lets you discount (or fully comp) a specific line instead of the whole bill. These options live in the line’s ⋮ menu and appear once the line is part of a saved order — in the normal dine-in flow that’s after you’ve fired the KOT, so the line is sitting in the sent half of the cart. The flow:

Open the line’s ⋮ menu.
Choose Discount (or Comp (Free) to take the whole line off at no charge).
Pick Percentage (%) or Fixed (₹).
Enter the value, optionally a reason, save.

The line now shows a small green badge (e.g. 10% off) and a reduced total. The bill subtotal and tax recalculate.

💡 Item discount vs. bill-level discount. Meztezz lets you apply discounts at the line level or at the bill level or via an offer — but not all of them stacked. Specifically, you can’t have a manual bill-level discount and an offer-driven discount on the same bill. This is intentional and prevents reports from going haywire. Pick one mode per bill. Detailed rules are coming in the Discounts, Offers & Happy Hours post.

5.2 What You Can’t Do (Before Send)

You can’t assign individual items to a different station from the billing screen. A menu item’s station is fixed in Masters — Tandoor, Bar, Main Kitchen, etc. — and that’s the station the KOT routes to. If you genuinely need a tandoor item to come out of main kitchen tonight, fix it in More → Menu Management; the change applies from the next order.

Part 6 — Holding an Order to Come Back To

Sometimes the guest changes their mind, the captain gets pulled away, or the cashier needs to ring up a takeaway in between. That’s what Hold is for.

6.1 Putting an Order on Hold

With items in the cart, press F3 (or tap the Hold action on screen). Meztezz:

Saves the current cart (items, variants, addons, notes, quantities) as an order with status held.
Clears the billing screen so the cashier can take the next order.
The Recall (F4) button now shows a count.

Held orders are per-terminal today — you can’t park an order on one terminal and recall it on another. (See Part 12.)

6.2 Recalling a Held Order

Press F4 or tap Recall. A sheet slides up with two sections:

Held orders — the ones you put aside intentionally.
Needs Repayment — bills where a payment was cancelled and the cashier still needs to collect again. (See the upcoming Settling Bills & Payments post.)

Tap an entry → its items reload into the cart with all variants, addons, and notes intact. The Hold record disappears; if you want to put it back on hold, you’ll need to Hold again from the recalled state.

💡 Use Hold instead of “just leaving it on the screen”. If a cashier walks away mid-order to chase the chef, the next person to use that terminal will accidentally add items to the wrong bill. Hold takes one tap and prevents the entire class of “items billed to the wrong table” mistake.

Part 7 — Sending to the Kitchen — The KOT

This is the headline action of the whole screen. Everything before this point has been editable scratch-work; firing the KOT is the moment the kitchen, your stock pipeline, and your audit log all start paying attention.

7.1 The Two Action Buttons — F5 and F6

You’ll see two buttons at the bottom of the cart. They sound similar; they do very different things.

Button	Shortcut	Action
KOT	`F5`	Fires a KOT for all currently-unsent items. The cart stays open. Does not take payment.
Pay (label varies)	`F6`	The primary action. For dine-in, opens the payment screen. For takeaway and delivery-prepaid, combines KOT + payment into one step (so the label reads “Pay & Send to Kitchen”). For aggregator, just reads “Send to Kitchen”.

For dine-in service, the rhythm is:

Take order → press F5 → KOT fires → kitchen starts cooking.
Take additions later → press F5 again → another KOT fires for just the new items.
When the guest asks for the bill → press F6 → payment screen opens.

For takeaway and prepaid delivery, payment usually happens up-front, so F6 collapses both steps into a single action.

7.2 What Happens When You Press F5

Behind the scenes, a single transaction does all of the following:

Reads the unsent items off the cart.
Looks up each item’s station (from Masters).
Generates one KOT row per unique station — items going to the bar end up on the bar KOT, tandoor on the tandoor KOT, etc.
Assigns the next KOT number (resets daily at your business-day cutoff).
Marks every item in the transaction as sent_to_kitchen so it can never be duplicated.
Flips the table to occupied (dine-in only) — the floor grid updates everywhere.
Tags the KOT with the originating terminal so multi-terminal restaurants can tell who fired it.

Only after that transaction commits does Meztezz:

Push the KOT to the Captain App and any connected Kitchen Display Screens over WebSocket.
Send the formatted ticket to the assigned station printer (or fall back — see Part 8).
Record the print timestamp once the ticket has been sent to the printer.

💡 Stock is not deducted at KOT creation. Inventory deducts only when the kitchen marks a KOT ready. The reason is honest accounting: until the kitchen actually starts the dish, the stock should still be available for another order. If you’ve ever wondered why your stock report sometimes “lags” what’s been billed, this is why — billed-but-not-ready KOTs are in between.

7.3 The Hard Liquor Stock Block

There is exactly one situation where pressing F5 will be refused outright with no override: a bar item whose recipe would drain more liquor than you currently have on hand (sealed bottles plus open millilitres). Excise rules in most Indian states make negative liquor stock a compliance problem, so Meztezz refuses to fire the KOT. You’ll see an explicit message naming the bottle that’s short. The fix is either to add stock first (via Inventory → Receive Stock) or to remove the offending line from the cart.

Everything else — over-billing food items, missing recipes for non-bar items, expired batches with the kill-switch off — produces a warning or a manager-PIN prompt but does not block the order. That’s deliberate: in a real Indian restaurant kitchen, stock inputs are often imperfect and billing must continue.

7.4 Re-Printing a KOT

If the kitchen printer ran out of paper, the ticket smudged, or the captain wants a second copy, re-print is on the Kitchen Display Screen (KDS):

Find the KOT card on the KDS.
Tap Print on the card.

Re-printing doesn’t generate a new KOT number, doesn’t double-deduct stock, doesn’t change order state — it just sends the exact same ticket bytes to the printer again. Use it freely.

7.5 The Pay (F6) Button — A Closer Look

Because the F6 button changes label depending on context, the table below makes it explicit:

Scenario	F6 label	What it does
Dine-In, with unsent items in cart	`Pay`	Goes to payment. Any unsent items must be fired with F5 first or they won’t be on the bill.
Dine-In, all items already sent	`Pay`	Goes to payment.
Takeaway, new order	`Pay & Send to Kitchen`	Fires KOT and opens payment.
Delivery, Prepaid	`Pay & Send to Kitchen`	Same as Takeaway.
Delivery, COD	`Pay`	Like dine-in; you’ll fire the KOT with F5 first, collect cash later when the rider returns.
Aggregator order	`Send to Kitchen`	Fires KOT only; payment is handled by the aggregator, not in the POS.
Recalled order being completed	`Pay (Complete Order)`	The order already exists in the DB; this finishes it.
Partially-paid bill	`Pay Remaining`	Opens payment for the outstanding balance only.

There’s nothing magic going on — the button is just labelled honestly for whatever the next step actually is.

Part 8 — One KOT per Station — How Routing Works

Stations are the heart of multi-prep-line kitchens. A typical Indian restaurant might have Main Kitchen, Tandoor, Bar, Chinese Wok, Dessert. Each of those is one station in Meztezz.

8.1 The Two-Step Mapping

There are two distinct concepts:

Items → Stations — every menu item is tagged with exactly one station (in Masters). Tandoori prawns → Tandoor. Chocolate brownie → Dessert. Old Monk Large → Bar.
Stations → Printers — every station can be pointed at a thermal printer (in Settings → Printer). Tandoor → Printer-Kitchen-2. Bar → Printer-Bar. And so on.

The reason for two steps: it lets you re-route a whole station to a different printer (say the tandoor printer dies mid-shift) without touching a single menu item.

8.2 What Happens at KOT Time

When you press F5 with a cart containing items across three stations, Meztezz:

Generates three KOT rows in the database — one per station — each with its own KOT number.
Sends each one to the printer assigned to that station.
Each ticket shows only the items belonging to that station — the bar isn’t reading butter chicken instructions, the tandoor isn’t reading whisky orders.

8.3 What If a Station Has No Printer Assigned?

Nothing breaks. The KOT row is still created in the database; it shows on the KDS (Kitchen Display) screen if you have one; it appears in the KOT Display Panel inside the billing screen; it just doesn’t physically print. This is by design — small restaurants often run a single bar printer plus a tablet KDS for the food side, rather than a printer at every station.

8.4 KDS — The Tablet/Screen Alternative

Instead of (or in addition to) thermal printers, you can run the Kitchen Display Screen on any tablet or laptop on the same network. KDS shows all KOTs in real time, lets the kitchen mark items Preparing → Ready → Served, and is the surface where stock actually deducts (when an item is marked ready).

For a deeper KDS walkthrough we’ll have a dedicated post. For now, the headline: printer and KDS are not mutually exclusive — most restaurants run both, with KDS as the “always visible” view and the printer as the “actionable handoff” view.

Part 9 — Adding More After the First KOT

Service rarely ends after the first KOT. The guest orders mains first, dessert later. Here’s how that works.

9.1 The Second-Round Workflow

The order stays open (and the table stays occupied) until you complete the bill. To add more items:

Open the existing order — either it’s already on the cart panel (if you never left it), or pull it up by tapping the occupied table on the Tables screen, or recall it from the side panel.
Add the new items. They sit in the unsent half of the cart, above the divider.
Press F5 again.

A new KOT fires for only the new items. The original sent items aren’t reprinted, aren’t duplicated in stock movements, aren’t double-counted in reports. Idempotency is enforced inside the database transaction, so even if a cashier hammers the button twice, only one new KOT comes out.

9.2 What the Cart Looks Like Mid-Order

You’ll see two visually distinct zones:

Above the divider — unsent. Editable. Adds, edits, removes are free.
Below the divider — sent. Read-only by default. To change anything down here, you need the cancel/edit flow described in Part 10.

This is the single most useful thing on the screen for a busy cashier: at a glance, you can tell which items the kitchen has seen.

9.3 The Total So Far

The footer total reflects everything — sent and unsent. So a cashier can quote a running tab even mid-build without doing arithmetic.

Part 10 — Cancelling an Item After It’s Sent

Once an item is on a KOT, it’s part of the audit trail. Pulling it back is allowed, but it leaves a footprint — that’s the whole point.

10.1 The Cancel Flow

Tap a sent item in the cart → choose Cancel Item. A dialog opens asking for:

Reason — pick from the built-in list: Customer cancelled, Wrong order, Kitchen error, Items unavailable, Customer no-show, Other.
Manager PIN — required when the KOT status has already advanced to Preparing or further. If the KOT is still pending (kitchen hasn’t started), the cancel goes through without a PIN.

On confirm, Meztezz:

Marks that single KOT line cancelled (the rest of the KOT continues).
Logs the cancellation in the audit trail with cashier, reason, time and PIN-holder.
If the KOT had already deducted stock (i.e. was marked ready before you cancelled), it restores the stock movement as wastage — not as a return-to-shelf — because the food was physically prepared.

10.2 What the Kitchen Sees

If KDS is connected, the cancelled line greys out on the kitchen screen with a strikethrough and a “Cancelled — guest changed mind” callout. If they were printing, a small cancel slip prints at the relevant station. Either way, the chef finds out — there’s no silent cancel.

10.3 What You Still Can’t Do

Move a sent item to a different station. The item is locked to the original station once the KOT is fired. If you fired it to bar by mistake, cancel and re-add (correct station in Masters first).
Change a sent item’s variant or addons. Same as above — cancel the sent line, add a fresh one.
Cancel a whole completed/paid bill from this screen. Once the bill is paid, the cancellation path moves to the dedicated Refunds & Cancellations flow. We’ll cover that in its own post.

Part 11 — Where the KOT Shows Up Beyond the Printer

The thermal slip in the kitchen is the most visible output, but it’s not the only one.

11.1 The KOT Display Panel — On This Terminal

Already mentioned in Part 7. This panel lists every KOT generated on this terminal today — pending, preparing, ready, served, cancelled. It’s a live feed; status updates from KDS or other terminals flow in over WebSocket.

11.2 Other Terminals in the Same Restaurant

If you run two billing terminals (say cashier-1 and cashier-2), a KOT fired on terminal-1 is visible on terminal-2’s KOT Display Panel almost instantly. The two terminals share the same database (within the restaurant), so neither can over-write what the other has done.

11.3 The Captain App

If your captains are taking orders on the captain-app (their phone), every KOT fired — whether by the captain or the cashier — appears on the captain’s order list. The captain can see “this order is now preparing”, which lets them tell the guest “five more minutes” without walking back to the kitchen.

Crucially, a captain pressing Send on the captain-app fires the KOT immediately — there is no “cashier accepts” queue. The captain-app and the billing terminal are co-equal sources of orders.

11.4 The Kitchen Display Screen (KDS)

Covered in Part 8.4. The KDS is the screen the kitchen pass actually looks at, even in restaurants that also print tickets.

11.5 The Cloud Dashboard — Eventually

KOTs sync up to app.meztezz.com along with everything else, so when you look at sales-by-hour or items-sold reports the next morning, every KOT is represented. The cloud is read-only for operational data — you can’t cancel a KOT from the dashboard, and you shouldn’t ever need to.

Part 12 — Honest List of What Meztezz Doesn’t Do (Yet)

We’d rather you know in advance.

Held orders are per-terminal. You can’t park an order on terminal-1 and recall it on terminal-2. If you need to hand off an order across terminals during a busy shift, transfer the table instead (covered in Tables & Reservations — see Part 4, the Transfer / Merge / Split section).
One variant per item line. A cart line can have exactly one variant (one size, one portion). To bill “two sizes of the same dish” you’ll see two cart lines, not one with two variants.
No decimal quantities. Quantities are whole numbers. For weight-billed items, model the weights as variants.
No per-cart-line station override. A menu item’s station is fixed in Masters. If a tandoor item needs to come from the main kitchen tonight, fix it in Masters or move the line to a different item.
No automatic addon-count limits. If an item has eight add-ons, the cashier could in principle tick all eight. Keep add-on lists curated.
Stock deducts at KOT-ready, not at KOT-fire. Useful to know if a stock report appears to lag billing.
The captain-app fires KOTs immediately. There is no “cashier review” gate. If you want gatekeeping you’ll need to manage what captains can do via their role in Settings → Roles, not rely on a queue.
No “duplicate this order” / “save as template”. A bulk catering order with 40 lines has to be re-entered each time. Recurring-order templates aren’t shipped today.
No table-side guest-pays-themselves at this stage. The cashier collects payment from the F6 flow. Guest-side QR payment (where the guest scans and pays themselves) is on the roadmap but not in this guide.

If any of these are deal-breakers for your operation, write to us. We prioritise feature work based on what real restaurants ask for, and a clear we need X because Y message goes a long way.

Part 13 — A Few Habits That Save You Later

Pick the order type before you fire the first KOT. It’s locked once the first KOT fires; quietly switching dine-in to takeaway after that isn’t possible.
Use F5 the moment the captain finishes calling the order. Don’t wait until the guest asks for the bill. Earlier KOTs = faster food = better reviews.
Use Hold (F3) instead of leaving the cart open. Walking away from a half-built order is how items end up on the wrong bill.
Set up your quick-instruction chips on Day 1. Five chips for your five most common requests will save thousands of taps a month.
Keep add-on lists short and curated. The system won’t stop a cashier ticking ten add-ons; your menu design should.
Lean on the manager PIN for cancelling sent items. Cancelling a sent dish that’s already preparing prompts for a manager PIN, so cashiers can’t silently void it. Treat that prompt as the control, not an afterthought.
Treat re-print as free. If a KOT slip went missing, re-print it without hesitation. It doesn’t double-deduct, doesn’t double-bill, doesn’t change anything beyond pushing bytes to the printer again.
Match your station names to how your kitchen actually talks. If your team yells “fire it to the tandoor”, call the station Tandoor, not Station-2.

Stuck? We’re Here to Help

If any of this didn’t behave the way the guide describes — a KOT that won’t fire, a printer that’s saving but not printing, an item modal missing an addon you expected, a “Send to Kitchen” button that’s greyed out — drop us a line at bazimat@gmail.com or contact us. Tell us which Part you’re on and what you’re seeing; we’ll usually have you sorted in a single back-and-forth.

Once your KOT rhythm is steady, the next chapter is what happens after the food is out: Settling Bills, Payments & Splits. We’ll publish that one next. 🎉