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Pacing alerts: ready, late, and recall

How the ready and late colour alerts work, how to give each course its own times, the rules on the thresholds, and how the recall window keeps bumped tickets reachable.

Pacing alerts make slow tickets stand out so the kitchen can keep to time. They apply to stations shown on a screen and are set per station. Open the station, and they're in the Output box, in the screen settings that open up once the output is set to KDS screen — alongside that station's screen links. Click Save in the top bar to apply them.

Note

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

Ready and late alerts

A ticket's header changes colour as it ages, counting from when the kitchen got it:

  • Ready alert (default 10 minutes) — once a ticket has been open this long, its header turns amber: a nudge that it's been a while.
  • Late alert (default 15 minutes) — past this point the header turns red: this ticket is overdue and needs attention.

A fresh ticket is its normal colour, goes amber at the ready threshold, then red at the late threshold.

Note

A held course starts its clock when it's called away, not when the guest ordered. A dessert ordered at 7:30pm and called away at 9pm shows 00:00 when it lands, and gets its full time from there.

The rules on the thresholds

  • Enter both in minutes. The fields are in minutes because that's how kitchens think about timing.
  • Late must be greater than ready. Red has to come after amber. If you set late equal to or below ready, the staged colour change can't work — make late the larger number.

Different times per course

Starters, mains and dessert rarely deserve the same patience. If you serve in courses, each course can have its own amber and red times, set on the station under Times per course.

A typical set-up:

| Course | Amber | Red | | --- | --- | --- | | Starters | 15 min | 20 min | | Mains | 20 min | 25 min | | Dessert | 15 min | 20 min |

  • Leave a course blank to use the station's times. A blank box shows the station's own number greyed out, so you can see what it's falling back to. You don't have to fill in every course — set mains only, and starters and dessert carry on using the station's times.
  • To put a course back to the station's times, empty both of its boxes. There's no separate reset.
  • Set both boxes, or neither. If you fill in amber and leave red blank, the save is refused and names the course — rather than picking a red time for you that you never chose.
  • The same rule applies as above: a course's red must be greater than its amber.

Each course is timed from when the kitchen got that course, so a dessert called away at 9pm gets its full 15 minutes from 9pm.

Note

You'll only see Times per course if course firing is switched on for your account. The rows are named using your own course names — see Set up courses.

On a table card

If your kitchen screen shows one card per table, the card takes its colour from the worst course on that table. A table whose mains are 25 minutes old reads red even if a starter was fired a minute ago.

The recall window

When a ticket is bumped (marked complete), it leaves the live view but stays reachable for a while in case it was bumped by mistake or the order comes back.

  • Recall window (default 30 minutes) — how long a bumped ticket stays available to bring back. You can set it anywhere from 1 minute up to 24 hours.
  • After the window passes, the ticket drops out of recall.

Set a longer window for a busy kitchen where mistakes need a generous grace period; a shorter one keeps the recall list tidy.

When timers reset

  • On bump. All of a ticket's timers reset when it's bumped. If a ticket is recalled and worked again, its ready/late colours start counting fresh from the recall, not from the original order time.
  • On call away. A held course's timer starts when the course is called away, not when the guest ordered — which is what makes a per-course time usable at all.

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