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Set up courses

Name your course structure, put your dishes into courses, and see how many of them actually have one.

Courses are what let the kitchen pace a service: starters go out, mains wait until you call them away, dessert waits after that. The Courses page is where the whole thing is set up.

Note

Courses must be switched on for your account for this page to appear. If you don't see Courses in the sidebar, ask your account manager.

How the page is laid out

Top to bottom: the coverage number, then your course profiles, then your menus, then the long list of dishes you put into courses. The short things come first on purpose — the dish list runs to hundreds of rows, and what the course dropdown beside each dish means depends on the profile and menu sections above it.

Start with the number at the top

The first thing the page tells you is how many of your dishes actually have a course — "12 of 45 dishes have a course" — and it names the ones that don't.

This is the number to check first, because a dish with no course fires straight away no matter what your kitchen settings say. Coursing only ever holds the dishes you have actually put in a course. A setup that looks complete but reads "0 of 21" isn't doing anything yet.

Course profiles

A course profile is a named course structure — "À la carte" with Starters / Mains / Desserts, or "Tasting menu" with seven. You build it once and pick it per menu, so an à-la-carte menu and a tasting menu can run different structures.

To create one, click New profile, give it a name, and you land on its own page. There you set:

  • The courses, in the order the kitchen fires them. Add, rename, reorder with the arrows, remove.
  • A colour for each course (optional) — pick one of the swatches under a course's name, or leave it on the plain dash for no colour. A coloured course shows that same colour on the table board, so "Mains" reads as the same colour on every table at a glance. Skip it and that course's chip just keeps its usual look.
  • Which menus use it — tick a menu and it serves this structure. A menu can only serve one, so ticking it here moves it off whatever it was on before.

Everything on that page saves with the single Save button in the top bar — including the colours.

Note

"In force" next to a profile's name means that profile is the one whose names your till and kitchen screens are currently showing. If you have more than one profile, the one used by the most menus wins.

Putting dishes into courses

Naming courses doesn't put any dish in one. Do that right here, in the Courses panel at the bottom of the page — below your profiles and menus:

  1. Narrow the list if you want to: pick a category from the dropdown above the table, or search by name. Both are optional.
  2. Tick the dishes — or tick the box in the table header to take everything currently listed, which is how you course a whole category in one go.
  3. Choose the course from the second dropdown.
  4. Click Set course for N products.

It saves immediately; there is no separate Save on this page. The number at the top updates as you go.

Note

The header tick box takes everything that matches your current filter and search, including rows on later pages — not just the ones you can see. The button says how many it has, so check that number before you click it.

The category dropdown lists every category your dishes sit in, with a count beside each, plus No category for dishes that aren't on a menu yet. A dish placed under the same name on two menus appears once; a dish in two different categories appears under both. Changing the category clears whatever you had ticked, so tick after you filter, not before.

Note

A course belongs to the dish, not to the menu. Setting a dish's course applies everywhere that dish appears — on every menu, on the till and on your kitchen screens. There is no such thing as "this dish is a starter on one menu and a main on another". That is also why your course names come from one structure for the whole account rather than per menu.

The list shows your uncoursed dishes first, so the work still to do is always at the top. On a very large catalogue it shows the first 300 and tells you what it has left out — and note the category filter and the search both work on that shown list, so neither can reach a dish it has left out.

Doing it from Menu routing instead

If what you're actually doing is setting a dish up for the kitchen, KDS → Menu routing now carries a Course dropdown on every row, next to that dish's station buttons. You can give a dish its station and its course in one pass without moving between two pages. See Route menu items to stations.

Use this page when you want the overview (what's still uncoursed, which profile is in force, which menus use it). Use Menu routing when you're working dish by dish.

Doing it from a menu instead

If you are already editing a menu, you don't have to come here either. The menu editor still has its own course controls, and the Assign dishes link next to a menu takes you straight into them. See Build a menu for setting a course on one product at a time or on a whole category at once.

All three routes set the same thing, the dish's course. There is only ever one value.

A station that doesn't do courses

Not every station works in courses. A bar or a coffee station usually wants the whole order the moment it's sent, not a course at a time. Open that station under KDS → Stations and turn Courses off — it then receives whole orders, uncoursed, while every other station carries on as before. See Set up kitchen stations.

Deleting a profile

Deleting a course profile detaches it from any menu using it — those menus become uncoursed. Your dishes keep whatever course they were already in, so nothing is lost if you re-create the structure.

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