Use local network for KDS communications

[lemondogs]

This evening square's systems had an interruption in service. For whatever reason this meant transactions were working smoothly for us, but our KDS's were not receiving ticket data from the orders. Worse, there was no indication that there was a problem - the KDS iPads all said they were updated and there was no tickets, but we had *just* placed three orders.

Thankfully our kitchen is super tiny and so we just wrote out paper tickets, knowing that Square was having problems. However if we were a larger operation, taking orders at front of house with the KDS in a separate kitchen area, we wouldn't have known this was a problem until the customer started complaining about their food being missing.

Tickets eventually showed up on the KDS, delayed by around 30-45 minutes.

I think it would be super handy if the KDS could receive those orders from the POS directly on the local network. This way if Square had an outage or if the Internet were down, staff could still take orders using cash and/or offline CC processing and the KDS process flow could still function normally, rather than break down entirely because of either Square server issues or Internet problems.

[nika]

So sorry about the disruption yesterday @lemondogs. Can definitely pass that feedback along to our developers.

[lemondogs]

Thanks! Outages are always going to happen, whether frequent or not, and at least so far they haven't been frequent.

I just hope there's some options on the devs' radar for mitigating problems like this during outages, like local networking or a better error detection system so at least it's more obvious when there's a communications breakdown between the devices.

Funny enough during this outage the Restaurants app had no problem taking and submitting the orders without showing any errors on screen when in fact the KDS wasn't receiving the tickets. Yet more recently when there wasn't an outage (that we know of) occasionally when taking orders we'll get a failure to send to KDS error, at which point we tap retry and it then works fine. Just some sorta-dark humour involved for us to get errors while things appear to be working and don't get errors while they're not 🙂