Add items, fire a course, apply a discount

An open order is not frozen. These are the changes you can make to one, and what each needs.

Append items

A second round, a dessert ordered after the mains — append items adds them to the existing order rather than opening a new one, so the table gets one bill.

Needs: manage orders, and the POS orders capability on your plan.

Appended items are new lines. Existing lines are not touched, and anything already paid for stays paid for.

Fire a course

If you serve in courses, items are tagged starter, main or dessert, and firing a course is what sends that group to the kitchen. The kitchen gets the starters when you fire starters, not at the moment the whole order was taken.

Needs: manage orders, and courses switched on.

Courses ship switched off

Courses are one of four POS features that are in your plan but start off, along with table sessions, split checks and seat tracking. Turn them on under Setup → Features — see Turn features on and off.

Assign or change the table

A dine-in order can be moved to a different table, or given one if it did not have one. Needs manage orders and the tables capability.

Assign a server

An order can be assigned to a member of floor staff. This is what makes a waiter’s own section, and their own sales, meaningful in reporting. Needs manage orders and either tables or POS orders.

Apply a discount

A discount is applied to the order as a whole, and it can be removed again while the order is open.

Needs the apply discount permission specifically — not just manage orders. This is the point of it: every member of floor staff can take an order, and not every member of floor staff should be able to take 20% off it.

You can also enter a coupon code at the moment you record payment, which is a different thing from a manual discount: a coupon is a rule you set up in advance under Catalog → Coupons, and it validates itself.

Change the order type

See Order types.

What you cannot do

You cannot edit a line’s price. Prices come from the menu, from channel pricing, and from pricing rules. If a price is wrong, it is wrong in the catalogue, and fixing it there fixes it for everyone.

You cannot simply delete a line. Removing an item from an order is a void, and a void needs an approver — see Void an item. This is the deliberate control that stops an order being quietly made smaller after the food has left the kitchen.