How to route kitchen tickets with POS Places

POS Places turn one order into the right tickets at the right places. Without them, the kitchen prints everything on one printer and the chef sorts manually. With them, the food goes to food, drinks go to drinks, and nobody has to read the whole order to find their items.

Step 1 — Define your places

POS → POS Points, then click the POS Places button at the top of the page (or open /pos/posplaces directly), then click + to create a place. Each place needs:

• Name — "Hot Kitchen", "Cold Kitchen", "Bar", "Coffee Station", "Pizza Oven". One per physical work area.
• Send to — printer (paper ticket) or activeOrders (screen display in the order list).
• Printers per device — when sendTo is printer, map which physical printer fires the ticket. Multiple rows let you map per device (one printer when sent from cashier 1, another from cashier 2).
• Declare paper size on print — toggle that sets paper-size metadata on the print job. Useful for thermal printers that need explicit width.

Step 2 — Tag products

POS → Products → open each product → POS Places field. Pick which places make this product:

• Steak → Hot Kitchen.
• Caesar Salad → Cold Kitchen.
• Cocktail → Bar.
• Pizza → Pizza Oven.
• Bottled water → no places (no preparation needed).

Bulk-update is faster for setup — open the products list, multi-select all 'food' products, set POS Places to Hot Kitchen in one go (if your UI supports bulk edit; otherwise edit per product, but the catalog setup is one-time work).

Step 3 — Test by sending a multi-place order

Open POS, take an order with one item per place (steak + salad + cocktail). Click Send to Kitchen. Three tickets fire — one per place — to their respective printers (or appear in the activeOrders list if that's how the place is configured). Confirm each ticket has only its own items, not the whole order.

Common patterns

• Two-printer kitchen — Hot Kitchen and Cold Kitchen as separate places, each on its own printer. Tickets land at the right station; no kitchen-side sorting.
• Bar with screen — Bar place set to activeOrders. Bartender watches a tablet showing the active drink queue rather than peeling tickets off a printer.
• Backup printer — same place, two printer entries (one main, one backup IP). Configure your OS to mirror the print job; main goes down, backup keeps printing.
• Multi-outlet property — Restaurant Hot Kitchen, Pool Bar Kitchen, Spa Cafe Kitchen as three separate places. Same product (e.g., burger) can go to whichever places its outlets serve from.