Square for Restaurants & KDS: What features or improvements would you like to see in 2022?

[rajatdeva]

Hello Seller Community 👋🏼 My name is Rajat and I work on the Square for Restaurants team here at Square.

As we look into next year, we’re hoping to hear from you all on what you would like to see in development for our Square for Restaurants product, which include the Restaurants Point of Sale app and Square KDS!  

                                                    

 

 

These can be suggestions that have already been mentioned on the Square for Restaurants feature request board, but that you’ve identified as your top feature request that you’d like to see developed in 2022! Think of it as a Square for Restaurants and/or a KDS ‘wish list’. 

Please reply below with some feature suggestions or product improvements that you’d like to see. Your comments will be recorded and reviewed by our Square for Restaurants Product Team. 

 

[lgmbts · Accepted solution]

A more robust way to manage inventory, on the fly.  We "retire" inventory and produce new inventory all day, every day.  Being able to click on a tracked item in the POS and adjust inventory on the fly would be HUGE!  Having to stop using the register as a register, log into the dashboard, and adjust inventory is clunky, inefficient, and not possible in the middle of a rush.

[21G]

We want the ability to make our kitchen printer sound an alarm when a new ticket comes in.  I see this request in forums all the time.  

[oldedixie]

Background

We are a fast-paced, high volume fried chicken food truck located in central Florida. We routinely have lines that are 20-40 people in length and will stay that way for 2-3 hours straight. We utilize the Square POS connected to a cash drawer, two USB kitchen printers, and a single Square KDS screen for our prep corner. The prep corner has a physical ticket printer and the KDS while the cashier has the other physical printer for printing order numbers/receipts. We have a physical ticket printer and KDS for the prep corner as we have been testing the KDS alongside the physical printer to be able to compare the benefits/opportunities. Below are our observations:

Combine Tickets After Order Placement

We would love to see an option to combine ticket numbers after an order has been placed. We often have customers who will place an order and then come back a minute or two later to add on a drink or additional food items for someone else. Our cashier generally has to shout to the prep corner that ticket 79 goes with ticket 76 for example. With the printed out tickets, it’s just a matter of shifting the tickets next to each other. It would be nice to be able to rearrange the order of the KDS tickets via drag and drop to put 76 and 79 next to each other. A graphical indicator indicating the tickets are for the same person would be helpful as well.

Reprint a Ticket on the KDS

We come across instances where the KDS just doesn’t receive the orders from the Square POS. Often times, this is not caught until we notice that the printed ticket numbers don’t match up with the KDS ticket numbers (ex. Physical printer: 2, 3, 4, 5 and KDS: 2, 4, 5. If we were relying solely on the KDS with no physical printer, it could be easy to not realize an order didn’t go through if the prep corner wasn’t paying attention to number sequencing. Going into the Square POS transactions and re-printing ticket causes a physical ticket to re-print but it doesn’t cause it to populate on the KDS.

KDS Doesn’t Always Match the Square POS Order Entry

Often times, items do not display in the same order as they do from the physical printed tickets. See example for clarification:

Example:

Cashier enters the following order:

1 x Breast

1 x Coleslaw

1 x Fries

1 x Thigh

1 x Wing

1 x Fries

Typically after fries, the prep corner knows that anything following fries is the start of another box on the ticket. That very same order may appear in the following manner on the KDS screen:

1 x Breast

1 x Coleslaw

1 x Fries

1 x Thigh

1 x Fries

1 x Wing

That minor shift is generally easy to spot and identify the way the cashier entered the order. When the tickets are longer with multiple boxes on the same ticket, this becomes a real pain to try and figure out what should be in each box. This brings us to our final request that we would love to see implemented on Square POS and represented on the KDS screen.

Ability to Separate Multiple Orders on One Ticket

It would be nice to have a button to tap on the screen that would create a line in between multiple boxes on a single ticket. Our workaround is that we’ve created an item that is just simply named “————“ with no price that the cashier taps to separate the two boxes from the order above.

1 x Breast

1 x Coleslaw

1 x Fries

1 x ————

1 x Thigh

1 x Wing

1 x Fries

The issue with this is that it counts as an item that needs to be cleared form the Square KDS with a screen tap and it shows up on the Square POS as $0 as well as an item that is tracked in our sales reporting. A button to tap on screen to create a line to separate different boxes on a single ticket would be amazing. It would not need to be cleared on the KDS screen, would not count as an item with 1 x next to it, and would simply represent a visual indicator to the prep corner that anything after the line is the next box.

EDIT: We would like to second the feature request by DAKOTAJOECOFFEE. The ability to have orders begin to populate on the KDS as the cashier was entering them would be very nice. This would give our prep corner time to start boxing up orders instead of having to wait for the customer to pay for their order as our cashier can put orders through much quicker than our prep team can fill them.

[o2lounge]

not sure if this is out there already but applying a coupon/discount to entire check vs having to do it for each individual item

[DSander]

it can be done for the whole check. 

[Chao]

want to be able to define number of step to prep the food. And tape the item multiple times to finish the preping. An also a timer for each item. For example, we put the cake in oven, tape the item on KDS prep station. So we know what items are in the oven without open it to check. After 20 the timer sounds, we open the oven and deliver the cake to front, tap the KDS on prep station again to make it finish preping.

[dsandusky44]

iPads aren't large enough KDS screens for our purposes. Would love some additional options.

[Donnie-M]

@TinyBrickOven They have an article on how to cast your ipad to a larger tv screen.  I use a cheap 32" led tv with apple air play I think it is.  Makes it super easy to use the ipad as a bump bar so to speak.  You can also screen mirror with an hdmi adapter and some other nifty options.

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Food-Drink-Group/Screen-Mirroring-with-Square-KDS-How-to-connect-... 

'

Donnie-M

[CBartlett]

The ability to add wholesale cost per item - not just retail price w/discounts!

[larissa166]

I’ve been thinking about wholesale too. We have wholesale and retail customers. Our retail customers order online. Our wholesale customers order outside of Square and I invoice them via Square. I’ve always wondered if there’s a way to create a login version of the site for our wholesalers where they can order product at our agreed upon price with them and they could pay when they order (so I don’t need to chase them

down later!). And ideally, retail and wholesale orders would come out of the same inventory. 

[TinyBrickOven]

The ability to pick multiple items under one category on square POS. Right now we ring up one pizza, then have to select the category again and select the second one. It's twice the work when someone wants 1 cheese and 1 pepperoni pizza. Same for appetizers etc. 

[Ryan_H]

are kitchen staffs working at diff items on a ticket able to mark the item ready without changing the status of the whole ticket?  if so we can have one KDS at each station.  Will be much more efficient.  

Also, when can square for restaurant integrate with Ubereats and Grubhub without an annoying useless third party?  There is no point to have a KDS if not all tickets from diff platforms are showing on it, only cause more confusion

[Kanishka]

we would like to get an option for remote printing.

1. we could get an option to print kitchen tickets remotely from square for restaurants.

or 

2. we could get an option for auto prints in kds would also be helpful so when an order is taken remotely kds will print orders automatically. either way our problem will be solved.

[AvenuePizza135]

As a pizzeria, we would like for there to be an option that categorizes delivery orders and keeps track of the customers name and addresses based on their phone numbers. This way when a returning customer calls again, when we enter the phone number, the address automatically pops up. Additionally, it would be nice to have a "notes" that is attached and to the specific phone number and is visible when the customers phone number is entered into the POS.

[vintageparis]

Square KDS for Android. 

[PatHandley]

A simpler version geared toward food trucks.

[oldedixie]

We use Square POS and KDS on our food truck. It works pretty well overall. There are just a few opportunities for us that I mentioned in a post on the fourth page of this thread. Have you tried it on your food truck? If so, what do you currently not like about it?

[Ginkhao]

We are also using it on our food truck. I am just rolling out the KDS this week. Our biggest issues are the lack of combos or bundles to track inventory. I currently have separate combos with many modifiers, but each item has its own modifiers which gets confusing without it being a group of items.  I hope that the KDS will solve some of our problems otherwise. Right now with the modifiers coming out as all red and the items being modifiers some things are getting missed. 

[clkirk]

We also use it on our food truck. Our issue is knowing what to plate together when there is more than one order on a ticket. We have tried several approaches. If we use modifiers to our main items to add the sides we lose the ability to track inventory and sales because inventory is not tracked on modifiers, but is is all very clear on the KDS. If we ring all items separately the inventory is correct but it is confusing on what gets plated together. The ability to add items to make diners, plattesr or combos would be a big help. Our work around is to have a modifier to all of our main items to be able to indicate whether the main item is a sandwich only,  platter (one side) or a dinner (2 sides) and then select the sides. When it shows on the KDS we now know how many sides to add to the main dish and they appear directly after the main item.

[ElTaquero]

The best approach I’ve had with this is to make a modifier with “plate A, plate B, Plate C, Plate D, Plate E, so on and so forth. That way all items with the respective “plate letter” are you be assembled together!

[Ginkhao]

We are doing similar, but our problem is some of the side items have their own modifiers. For us it would be much easier if I can group the items and make the individual modifier choices

[oldedixie]

This is one of the opportunities I had mentioned in my longer post. Most of our customers tend to order for multiple people on one ticket which means that ticket will have several boxes (platters in your case). With our food truck, customers have the ability to order combos or a la carte. If they order a la carte, not only is it difficult to determine what items go with each box on the order but it also tends to make the ticket much longer in length. With long tickets, paper ones sometimes want to curl and with the KDS display you have to scroll down to see additional items on the ticket. Our approach was to create an item with the name ————— or however many hyphens you’d like and give it a $0 price. When the customer is finished putting together one box, our cashier taps the menu item button ————— which adds it to the ticket and will let the prep station know that everything under that line belongs in the next box. The process can be repeated for as many boxes/platters that you have on the ticket.

It’s not a great workaround because it’s tracked in our sales report as an item sold even though it has no price, it takes up a menu item space on the POS screen, it adds to the overall length of the ticket, and it must be cleared from the KDS ticket unless you ignore it and just complete the entire ticket when finished assembling the orders. However, it has helped us in being able to box separate orders on a ticket more efficiently.

Example:

1 x Breast

1 x Leg

1 x Coleslaw

1 x Fries

1 x —————

1 x Thigh

1 x Wing

1 x Fries