Square KDS and Lengthy Prep Times

[londontea]

I just started using Square KDS last week, and while it’s been helpful there are so major flaws in the experience. I couldn’t find any posts about this in the community, so maybe there’s an easy solution that I overlooked. 

I have several bulk items that customers can order online, such as whole quiches and cakes. These items have a prep time of 48 hours to ensure that our baker has time to bake a cake. These orders show up on our expo KDS and they clog up the space. Many days the first 4+ orders on the screen are actually for pickup on a later day. They also make the color coding pointless as the screen is constantly showing red alerts. 

I considered assigning my bulk items to the same category, then hiding that category from the KDS. Unfortunately that does not fix the problem: most customers who order bulk items also include normal items (a drink, scone, etc.) in their order, so even if the bulk item was hidden the order would still appear on the KDS. 

Ideally, I’d like a way to mute orders in the KDS, and have them reappear X minutes before the scheduled pickup time.

For now, the orders with the lengthy prep times are proving to be very disruptive to the KDS experience. Does anyone have experience with this or suggested solutions? 

[ryanwanner]

@londontea  I have run into this problem as well with preorders. I had one order sitting on my screen for the last four days for pickup today.....

The only thing that I've found is to make KDS orders only appear when the ticket is marked as in progress from the Order Manager screens. That's a setting on KDS itself. Of course that then means we need to manage those bulk orders like a regular order, which can open up a different can of worms......

Otherwise, I think this would be a great Feature Request, right @isabelle ?

[londontea]

That’s certainly something I could look into, though I don’t know how well it would work for us. My staff always forgets to update the order status; they’re either too busy or it slips their mind. The KDS has been a massive help in ensuring that orders are marked as ready so that customers get notified. The problem now is that my staff is neglecting to use the KDS once the screen is filled with advanced orders. 

Making the KDS more user friendly to these types of orders would be very useful, I’m happy to provide more feedback to help make this happen!