Point of Sale - Is there a way to group items on a ticket?

[scratchkitchen]

[This thread's title was updated from the original post: ticket grouping.]

Is there a way to group items on a ticket? An example: When a group of people order together  and are paying for the meal all together, at our food truck, and one person orders 3 tacos, another orders 1 and then another orders 2. Is there a way to group each order so we know which tacos go to each order? Right now we have to go back after they pay and draw a line under each order to group them so we know how to package them up correctly. Is there an easier way?

[Tom · Accepted solution]

Hey @scratchkitchen, welcome to the Seller Community and thanks for bringing this up!

I see what you mean—it sounds like you need to customize the kitchen ticket to segment each customers' order, but preserve the ability for a single person to pay.

While a completely automated solution isn't available at this time, I ran this by a few team members and we suggest a workaround that may help:

• Create your items to reference the number of tacos desired by each of your customers (e.g. "3 Tacos" and "2 Tacos") with the type of tacos available listed as modifiers. If you enter in the order this way, it will result in the ticket printing out with each meal grouped together. 🌮🌮🌮

Hope this helps clear up confusion and improves efficiency for your restaurant. Please keep in touch for updates and don't hesitate to let us know if any other questions remain!

[KurtR]

Hi Tom,

I'm just setting up our POS for a taco truck as well and I was setting it up similarly by number of tacos.  But we'll often get customers who order 6 tacos and want 4 of them steak and 2 pork.  But if I do this, the cook would read it as two separate orders and put them on different plates when the customer just wants them altogether.  Suggestions?

Thanks!

Kurt

[AshleyK]

Hi @KurtR and welcome to the Seller Community!! I'm tagging some of our amazing Super Sellers to see if they have any tips and insight to help you out. 🙂

@pessosices @Ravenssong69 @shopfybr @LocavoreStore  @TCSlaguna @londontea @HC_Charlie @alexandriak @ber @ryanwanner  @GourmetOnWheels @Doran @allwhowander @VanKalkerFarms @homeprogreen @jjgard

[homeprogreen]

Easiest way to accomplish what you’re trying to do would be to create an item named “ taco plate “ as an example. Then you would add variations & prices to that item for each type of taco. So steak, pork, chicken, etc. so you would select taco plate then select your variations & quantity. So to use your example you would select taco plate, 4 steak, 2 pork. That way it shows as 1 order when the cook views it. There used to be a checkbox to limit each item to 1 variation so you would want to toggle that off when setting it up if it’s still enabled by default 

[KurtR]

Thanks homeprogreen!  I like what you're saying, but we offer 12 different kinds of meat fillings!  If someone would order 5 tacos and they can choose how many they would like of the 12 options (for example 1 steak, 1 pork, 2 chicken, and 1 barbacoa) the number of variations would be 248,832 (if my math is correct!). 

The only workaround I've figured out is to create a quantity variation and then make the fillings a modifier, which is ok.  But, to use the example plate above, the cook can see an order of 5 tacos, but will only see the 4 meat modifiers because I can't enter "chicken" in twice!

That just brings me back to the original problem: I can enter in each taco and its variation individually, but the cooks won't know if they're on the same or separate orders.

Any advice?

[Damncats]

I've been using square for about 3 years now. One thing I've wanted to be able to do is group items on a ticket into groups, so that when it prints out on the order ticket for the kitchen, it lets them know what tacos to group together, or what to group into their own bags. It would also be helpful if I want force a large order to print onto multiple smaller tickets, which in some situations makes orders easier to pipeline. 

[nika]

Hi there @Damncats-

I went ahead and moved your question to this thread. While we don't have the ability to automatically group like items on a ticket, Tom shares a workaround above that might help in the mean time.

I hope this helps!

[jackus]

I have this trouble when create ticket order then print it.

- rice place

- spring rolls

- Coke

I want square app to automatically rearrange all items into defined categories then print out like below

Appetizer

 -  spring rolls

Main dish

 -  rice plase

Drink

- Coke

[JustinC]

Thanks for stopping by @jackus - at this this time, sorting items categorically on an order ticket is not doable. It's organized in the order you add them to the ticket, so I recommend manually adding appetizers first, then main dishes, then Drinks.

[Fvasello]

We have just finished a surprisingly busy summer season using the Square Online store for ordering food at our Bakery and sandwich shop on Cape Cod. We found the online ordering to be incredibly problematic in several different ways. I posting this here because one of the biggest problems was not having the items grouped into categories. For example, an order ticket might come in like this:

Coffee

breakfast sandwich

(w/ modifiers)

muffin

latte

breakfast sandwich

(w/ modifiers)

cinnamon roll

chips

iced coffee

lunch sandwich

(w/modifiers)

coke

now, as anyone in food service knows, being able to quickly and clearly read a ticket is crucial to good error-free customer service. it’s super easy to miss something if a ticket is organized in such a haphazard way.

the person at the sandwich station doesn’t care about pastries, coffee, beverages, or snack items and the person making coffee doesn’t care about any food, other beverages, or snacks. If we are to continue using square online, for the volume of business we do, a ticket MUST be able to be organized in an efficient way, like this

BREAKFAST

Breakfast sandwich

(w/ modifiers)

breakfast sandwich

(w/ modifiers)

LUNCH

lunch sandwich

(w/modifiers)

PASTRY

Muffin

cinnamon roll

COFFEE

coffee

latte

iced coffee

BEVERAGES

coke

SNACKS

chips

You don’t need the category headings on the ticket, but I included there to make my point clear. 

without Just this Level of functionality, we will find another POS system and replace Square completely. We LOVE the Square register and POS for in person transactions inside the store, but the online ordering system has a long way to go. There are other serious problems we had with customers not understanding their orders were complete and showing up expecting their food and having to tell them to go back to the app and complete their orders. There’s something about The user interface that is confusing for many people. I think it’s because the app gives them a time that their order will be ready before they have actually completed the order process. They see that and think they’re done. 

we also had issues with orders not being printed even though the customer properly put their order in. They would show up expecting food and we would think they did not complete their order for the reasons above and begin explaining to them they needed to complete their order only to discover their order actually had been taken and showed up on the register, but for some unknown reason, never got printed. 

also, the inventory was constantly incorrect. At first we thought it was our error, but over time we realized there was some discrepancy that would occur when multiple people ordered the last quantity of an item at the same time. Then we’d have to look them up on the register and call or text them telling offering them a credit or substitution. This is just not a realistic thing to have to do with the volume of business we get during high season.

if these items are not addressed, we will not be continuing with square next year.

an informal canvassing of other businesses in town using square for food ordering and pick-up found that we were not the only ones having these problems. 

[feorge]

Ditto!!!  

[Johntredinnick]

Grouping items on the ticket would make life much easier for our kitchen and is done elsewhere e.g. epos.

[uniwebdigital]

I have a couple of food trucks with the same issue as the initial comment, any workaround with grouping besides creating many different variations?  

[Ria]

Great question @uniwebdigital - at this time creating different variations is the only work around available for this particular function. 

[Yoo]

I’m having the same issue as the original comment. Has square integrated a fix for this? If they haven’t will this be fixed in the near future?

[feorge]

Not at all… I think maybe on the pay version

[Thelodgefairfax]

Having the same issue! Had to create 1, 2, and 3 plate “items” with a gazillion variations. It would be nice if you could add quantity amounts to modifiers e.g. hit chicken twice and have it display as 2 chicken tacos !

[Josedgo]

I agree that this is something thats should be done, but seems like this problem has been going on for years and yet there is no solutions to it yet. Im now debating if to change from square to another pos system cause there's still no solutions to this. 

Sometimes customers ask for specific tacos  in packets and we cant add that in the system. And its also would be nice to add the order into sections, appetizers, entree, and drinks instead of having to search the things all over the ticket. 

Sometimes i add lines to let the kitchen know how to package the tacos 

ex 

2 x fajita 

2 x chicken

———————-

5 x fajita 

but then the grouping sucks cause it sends it to the kitchen with all the fajita tacos added up all together.  So the ticket ends up lookin like this to the kitchen and not being package how the customer was saying to be packaged. 

ex 

7 x fajita 

2 x chicken

———————-

and if you turn the grouping of you get each individual item printed and a long ticket and a waste of paper. 

when would this be fixed?