Kitchen Display (KDS)
Kitchen Display | KDS in the main menu is the screen a kitchen actually works from: a live board of open orders that refreshes itself as cashiers punch orders and updates in real time as other stations act.
Scoped to the station
A kitchen user is assigned to one or more departments, and their board shows only those departments' lines. The fry station sees fries; the bar sees drinks; neither is distracted by the other. The board's title names the departments it is showing.
The status flow
Each order line moves through three states:
- Processing — the line has arrived and is being cooked.
- Ready — the station marks the item (or the whole order) ready.
- Served — the food left the pass.
Item is ready, Mark Order Ready and Mark Order Served act at line or order level. When an order spans departments, serving one department's lines leaves the other departments' lines at Ready until they are served too — the order is only fully served when every station has finished. A paid-and-closed order no longer accepts status changes.
Late orders
A cooking-time limit set for your business drives the board's highlighting: orders that have waited past the limit stand out, so the expeditor sees the aging ticket before the customer does. Items' and categories' ready time values feed the same expectations.
Beyond the kitchen
The KDS is one of the consumers of the status flow — the POS's running-orders view and the dashboard's Order Type Summary (Running) card read the same statuses, and a customer-facing order-status display can show Ready orders by number. Order slips still print to the department printers; the display and the printer are complements, not alternatives.