Square KDS - How to create items for routing to seperate areas?

[CamasCon23]

We have (3) teams in our setup: Front of House (Register), Cooks, Finishers. Register persons take orders, give the printed Order ticket to the customer. Order ticket then prints to the back of the restaurant where (currently) the Finishers tells the Cooks what to make.

I want to add KDS to the Cooks section, so they see what to cook from a base level. In other words, what to grill or fry for the Finishers. The Cooks don't care the variations, customization, or specific needs of the finished goods - they simply want to know how many of item A, B, C to cook/fry/grill. It's up to the Finisher to customize per the ticket for the customer and hand it out. 

Make sense? How do I do this in Square start to finish?

[Donnie-M]

@CamasCon23 Couple of questions after a high level overview.

I have ran into this with how my item catalog was set up.  I have opened 4 stores over the years, so I spent about a month working on my item catalog to get it where I needed it.  In a perfect world, you can set up a tablet as a prep station and your expo (finisher in your case) can have an expediter station.  The prep station has a tab called all day totals, and this is kind of what you are looking for..how many cheeseburgers, how many fries, how many mozz sticks, etc. are "on the board" at any one time.  So anything that you want the cook to cook, you want it in a kitchen category for that item so you can tell it to go to that station.  

Now on printing tickets, I don't think there is necessarily a way to have a generic item ticket print without the variations modifiers etc.  But you could set up another printer to print tickets just to the grill.  I have went exclusively with thermal printers as they are cheaper, faster, no ribbons, and I have had no issues with heat.  So with the kds, you really want 2 screens and I would skip tickets at the grill and just let them work off their screen.  When they clear an item off, it will still be on the expo screen for your finisher with the ticket.

1.  Do you have to have paper tickets?

2.  Do you have the ability to have 2 screens?

3.  Are your people reliably bumping tickets when they are done?

[CamasCon23]

Thank you! 

No, we don't need paper tickets really. It was our first way of assigning / tracking orders. We are mobile food concessions selling Fried dough, funnel cakes, etc. I don't want the fried product to sit more than 1 minute without being served, as fresh is best.

So how would you restructure items / categories to accommodate this? Also we have variations right now to upsell additional toppings. Can this still be handled ok?

[Eddiemunster]

Hi @CamasCon23 I don't thinkn you can do what you are trying to do in terms of just showing the grill cooks how many funnels/fried dough to make without them seeing the part of the order that relates to them-you can route the orders to the grill cooks based on the category IE Funnel cake, Fried dough etc. However as @Donnie-M suggested above, if your staff view the day totals that may help them cook ahead. 

For me personally and our business (I route to a printer not a KDS screen but the principle is the same) set the categories you wish to send to the KDS Screen for the grill cooks IE Funnel Cakes, Fried Dough etc, and they can see the items they need to cook by order but can use the All Day totals as well. 

Hope that helps.