Kitchen screen

The board#

The kitchen screen shows orders as tickets in columns: new, accepted, preparing, ready. A tap pushes a ticket one column further. New orders appear straight away and with a sound.

You reach it at flavoso.com/kds, and it belongs to the Pro plan and above. ⚠️ With no language segment in the path: the dashboard and the kitchen screen carry none, unlike the website and this manual.

What is on a ticket#

Items with quantity and chosen options, the order type, for table orders the table, for pre-orders the wanted time, the guest's name and their note. A new order that sits unaccepted for too long turns amber first and then red; from when is up to you.

Whatever a cook does not need can be switched off. The price for instance: that is the register's business, and on a wall it is nothing but noise.

Your own phases#

The four columns are only the beginning. A kitchen can build its own flow: add phases, rename them, colour them and sort them, up to twelve of them. “Accepted, Prep, Grill, Pass, Ready for pickup” is a valid row.

Every phase of your own belongs to one of the four guest statuses. That is what decides when the guest is notified: “Grill” and “Pass” both belong to preparing, so a ticket travelling from one to the other sets off no second SMS.

The phases are ordered by guest status. That guarantees that a ticket travelling one column to the right never turns the guest status back.

A receipt printer instead of a screen#

Anybody who prefers paper to a tablet hangs a receipt printer in the kitchen. Every new order then comes out on a slip. Pro and up, same as the kitchen screen, and having both is fine.

⚠️ The printer asks us for work, we send nothing to it. That sounds like a detail and it is the whole difference: no driver, no PC beside it, no certificate and nothing opened up in the router. The printer is a client like a browser, which is why it works behind any ordinary connection.

What it takes is a network printer that speaks Star CloudPRNT or Epson Server Direct Print. Both are common restaurant models, not a special order.

You set it up under Settings → Integrations, step by step: you pick the maker, and Flavoso names the menu entries of your device by their real names. The address sits in exactly the step where you type it in. The box then says “Last check-in” with a time. ⚠️ That is the line that matters: a printer that stopped asking is otherwise only noticed on a Friday night, by the receipts that are missing.

• Set the polling interval on the device to 30 seconds. Shorter gains nothing: half a minute between order and receipt is something no kitchen notices, and anybody who wants it instantly has the kitchen screen.
• The slip carries the items with quantity and options, the order type, the table, the requested time, the guest's name and their note.
• ⚠️ NO price and no total. It is a kitchen slip and expressly not a receipt: Flavoso is not a register and does not want to be one.
• Right below the printer sits “What a receipt does to the order”. Without a kitchen display nobody taps “accepted”, the stage never moves and the guest gets no update. There you set which stage an acknowledged receipt puts the order on, and what happens by itself afterwards. ⚠️ The clock for that is the printer's request: without a connected printer, nothing happens there.
• Wer damit arbeitet, will meistens auch weniger Stände: unter Einstellungen → Bestellablauf, Kasten „Deine Stände“, wirfst du raus, was du nicht tippst. Zwei Stände heissen dann: Bon raus, Essen raus, fertig.

Stations: one post, one screen#

A kitchen with its own phases has its own posts as well. Whoever stands at the grill wants to see the grill column and nothing else; the pass wants “ready” and “ready for pickup”; the screen in the office wants all of it.

That is what stations are for. A station is a name and a selection of columns. The restaurant sets them up once; which station a screen shows is picked at the top of the board, and the device remembers it.

⚠️ A station is a view, not a second flow. A ticket pushed on at the grill moves into the kitchen's next phase, even when that phase is not on this screen at all. The sound rings on a station screen when work arrives in ITS first column, not for every order that comes in at the front.

1. 1

   Create a station

   At the top right of the board tap “Customize board”, then the tab “Stations” and “Add station”.

   Kitchen screen, Customize board

2. 2

   Name it

   A name you can shout across the room: Grill, Cold kitchen, Pass, Counter.

3. 3

   Pick the columns

   Tap which phases this station shows. With nothing picked it shows all of them.

4. 4

   Set it on the device

   A row with “Everything” and your stations now appears at the top of the board. What you pick here applies to this device and survives a restart.

5. 5

   Or as a bookmark

   The button “Copy the link for this device” hands you an address with the station in it. On a freshly set up tablet that is the fastest way: open the link, done.

Readable on the wall#

The board hangs in a kitchen and is read from a few metres away. That is why text size, column width, density and colour scheme are settings and not rules. “Contrast (wall)” is black with white type and made for exactly this case.

Everything applies at once, while you are still dragging the slider. A preview would be a lie here, because the only question is whether you can read it from over there.

The columns adapt to the width of the screen: as long as it just about fits, they shrink evenly, and only below that does the row scroll sideways. Single columns can be collapsed per device.

Sound#

Four signals from soft to alarm (“Soft tone”, “Bell”, “Chime”, “Alarm”), plus “No sound” and the volume. On request the signal repeats every twenty seconds for as long as a new order waits unaccepted.

⚠️ A browser plays no sound before somebody has clicked on the page. That is why there is a “Sound on” button at the top; it has to be pressed once on every device. After that the device remembers the decision.

Hardware#

A browser is enough. An ordinary tablet on the wall does the job; no special device is needed.

The board keeps the screen awake for as long as it is open, and it has a full screen mode. A kitchen screen that falls asleep is a kitchen screen that has missed an order.

It is in the business app too, with the same phases and the same tickets.