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Kitchen display (KDS) overview

Start here — what the kitchen display is, the three pieces that make it up, and where each lives.

The kitchen display system (KDS) shows orders to your kitchen. When an order is sent, its items appear on a kitchen screen — or print as a ticket — so the people making the food know what to prepare.

You find everything under the KDS section in the sidebar.

Note

KDS must be switched on for your account for these pages to appear. If you don't see the KDS section, ask your account manager.

Before you start

KDS routes existing menu items to kitchen stations; it doesn't create items. Set your menu up first — products, categories, and a menu — then come back here. See the items docs.

The pieces

Listed in the order you set them up — the same order they appear in the KDS sidebar section.

  • Stations — set up each station: name, screen or printer, and the screen link. Start here: routing has nothing to point at until your stations exist.
  • Menu routing — decide which items go to which station, and (if coursing is on) put each dish in a course while you're there. With one station and coursing off, you can skip it entirely.
  • Ticket editor — design how your tickets look. Its list also shows which stations print each ticket, where your venue has the new Ticket editor page.
  • Courses — name your course structure and see how many of your dishes actually have a course. Only if coursing is switched on for your account, which is a separate switch from KDS itself: courses also group a table's order on the till, so a venue can have one without the other.

How they fit together

  1. You create one or more stations — usually one per kitchen area (grill, cold prep, bar, pass).
  2. You use menu routing to point each item at the station(s) that should make it. With a single station you can skip this — every item goes there automatically. If you run more than one site, pick the location at the top of the routing page first: the stations and items then narrow to that site, and the "single station" shortcut is counted per site.
  3. When an order is taken, each item fires to its station's screen or printer.
  4. The ticket editor controls what those tickets show and how they're laid out.

With your menu items in place, create your stations first. If you only have one, you're done — everything routes to it automatically. With two or more, route items to them: a station with nothing routed to it stays empty, and an item still sells even if it isn't routed anywhere.

Note

With two or more stations, an unrouted item just isn't sent to the kitchen. That's how a pint at a pub works: staff serve it, no ticket. The rest of the order still reaches its stations, and the item stays on the bill. The Menu routing and Stations pages both list anything unrouted, so you can check nothing the kitchen should make is on it. With more than one site the banner counts per site, so a site with a single screen is never flagged. See Troubleshooting kitchen display problems if you suspect this has already happened.

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