Running a food stall without kitchen screens
How an event food stall can hold open orders as parked sales, take full payment and keep a paper docket routine while the kitchen screens save nothing.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Events businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Friday night at a food market. The queue for your stall runs past the next stand, three people are calling orders through the hatch, and the grill can only take so many patties at once. Somewhere between the person taking money and the person flipping burgers, an order goes missing. Worse, one gets cooked and handed over without anyone paying for it.
Restaurants solve this with kitchen screens that show each order the moment it is rung up. If you have opened the Commerce screens in Achekam, you will have seen restaurant table and kitchen views there too. Before you plan a weekend around them, know what they actually do, and then build the stall's routine on the parts of the till that are real.
What the table and kitchen views do today
The restaurant table and kitchen screens in Commerce store nothing. The same is true of the service jobs board, the online storefront and the hardware hub, and each of those screens says so. An order typed into the kitchen view does not reach the server, the till or your books. Close the tablet or reload the page and it is gone.
Treat those views as a preview of something not yet built. The working parts of the till, available to a business with the Point of Sale add-on, are the sale itself, parked sales, payments, cash-up and the reports that follow. A food stall can run well on those alone.
Parked sales as your open orders
The tool that does the job of a tab is the parked sale. A cashier rings up an order and, instead of taking payment, parks it on the server. Later, any of the business's tills can pick it up and finish it, but only once. If the customer wanders off, the parked sale can be dropped, and dropping it asks for a reason.
At a stall this suits two situations:
- A group that keeps ordering. The crew from the stand next door orders a round of wraps, then another, and wants to settle at the end. Park the sale, add to it each time, and close it when they pay.
- Two windows, one kitchen. If you take orders at the front and hand food out at the side, the side till can pick up a sale the front till parked. Because a parked sale can be picked up only once, two cashiers cannot both settle the same order.
Name each parked sale with its docket number rather than a description like "guy in the red cap". Late in the evening, half the queue is wearing a red cap.
Payment in full before a sale is done
The server refuses any till sale that is not paid in full. There is no "pay half now" and no completed sale with money still owing. For a stall that settles a common argument on the floor: food goes out only against a completed sale, or against a parked order the whole team knows is still open.
For cash, the till records what the customer handed over and the change given, so a dispute about change can be checked against the sale. Card payments are recorded by the cashier from the bank terminal's slip, because the till is not connected to any card machine; key the slip's details in carefully, since that is what you will reconcile against later. On a Kenyan shilling till, the cashier can also send an M-Pesa payment prompt to the customer's phone, which keeps the queue moving without a trip to the card machine.
No printer, drawer or terminal driven by the till
The till does not drive card terminals, receipt printers, cash drawers, scales or a customer display. Plan the stall's kit around that:
| What you might expect | What actually happens | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| A kitchen ticket prints when an order is rung up | Nothing prints | Use a paper docket |
| The cash drawer opens on a sale | The till cannot open it | Use a cash box the cashier opens by hand |
| The card amount is sent to the terminal | The cashier keys it into the terminal | Read the amount aloud before the customer taps |
| A printed slip for the customer | The receipt is a PDF of the posted sale | Offer to e-mail it, or print it afterwards if asked |
The receipt PDF is made by the server from the posted sale and shows every payment and the VAT by rate, so it is a proper record even without a slip printer at the hatch.
A docket routine that matches the till
Without kitchen screens, paper carries the order from the cashier to the grill. The trick is to make the paper and the till tell the same story. A routine that works at a busy hatch:
- Buy numbered duplicate docket books, one book per till per session.
- The cashier writes the order on the next docket, rings it up, and either takes payment or parks the sale under the docket number.
- The top copy goes to the kitchen pass; the carbon stays in the book.
- The kitchen cooks only from a docket, and the runner hands food out only against one.
- A spoiled docket is crossed out and kept, never torn out.
- At close, a supervisor compares the dockets used with the sales on the till's report.
During service, a supervisor can open a live X report of the till as a PDF to see how trading is going. When the stall shuts, the cashier counts the drawer by notes and coins, the server works out the expected cash and posts any difference to cash over and short, and the Z report frozen at that cash-up becomes the record you keep with the docket books.
If the count of dockets and the count of sales disagree, that is your lead. The ACFE's Report to the Nations, a global study of thousands of staff fraud cases, looks at how they came to light and which controls made a difference. A docket book that has to agree with the till is a small control of that kind, and it catches honest mistakes as often as dishonest ones.
Before the next market day
Check that the Point of Sale add-on is on, buy the docket books, and run a short rehearsal with the whole crew: park a sale, pick it up from the other till, drop one with a reason. Decide who closes the stall's day and checks the dockets. If you also run a bar next to the food, the same approach is set out for open bar tabs across tills, and if the field has weak signal, read selling when the venue signal drops before the gates open.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
