Order Lifecycle
A kitchen ticket is its own record with its own number, separate from the WooCommerce order. Knowing how the two relate saves a lot of confusion at the counter.
The five statuses
| Status | Where it appears | Moved on by |
|---|---|---|
| On Hold | Kitchen On Hold column, POS Kitchen Orders tab | The kitchen selecting Start |
| Preparing | Kitchen Preparing column, customer screen Preparing list | The kitchen selecting Mark as Completed |
| Completed | Kitchen Completed column, customer screen Completed list | The kitchen selecting Send |
| Sent | POS Sent Orders tab. The ticket has left the kitchen board | The counter selecting Create Bill, or Back to Hold |
| Deleted | Nowhere. The ticket is gone | The counter selecting Delete on the Kitchen Orders tab |
Every step can be walked back:
- Preparing → On Hold with Back to Hold on the kitchen board;
- Completed → Preparing with Back to Prepare on the kitchen board;
- Sent → On Hold with Back to Hold on the POS Sent Orders tab.
Dine in and take away take different routes
| Dine in | Take away | |
|---|---|---|
| Sent to the kitchen | Before payment, from the cart | After payment, from the payment page |
| WooCommerce order at that moment | Does not exist yet | Already created |
| Ticket card shows | Dine In plus the table name and booking number | Take Away plus the WooCommerce order number |
| Bill raised | Later, with Create Bill on the Sent Orders tab | Already paid |
| More items can be added | Yes, with ADD MORE | No |
Ticket numbers
Every ticket gets a short kitchen number that is easy to call across a kitchen. How it counts depends on the live channel.
- Firebase numbers tickets per day. The number restarts each morning and begins with the day of the month, so on the 7th the first ticket of the day is #71, then #72, #73 and so on.
- Socket keeps one running number that never restarts. The very first ticket is numbered the same way — the day of the month followed by 1, so #211 if the channel is first used on the 21st — and every ticket after that adds one, whatever the date: #212, #213 and onwards.
On both channels one counter is shared by all outlets.
A take away ticket also carries the WooCommerce order number on its card, shown as Take Away #219. That is the number to use when looking the order up under WooCommerce → Orders. A dine in ticket has no WooCommerce number until the bill is raised.
If you use an order number prefix
The Order Id Prefix set under Restaurant POS → Settings → General is applied to the numbers shown on the kitchen tabs inside the Point of Sale and on the printed kitchen and thermal receipts, so a ticket reads #POS_76 there. The standalone kitchen board shows the bare number, #76, and its search box matches the bare number too. Type the digits without the prefix when you look a ticket up on the board.
Does the board clear itself?
Only on the Firebase channel. Whichever channel you use, the kitchen record is not a sales history: your sales history is in WooCommerce → Orders and in the Point of Sale reports, and is never affected.
Firebase: the board resets every day
The kitchen board holds the current day only. The first time any screen connects on a new day, the previous day's tickets are cleared automatically and the ticket counter starts again.
This means:
- the board never fills up with yesterday's work;
- a ticket left in Completed overnight will not be there in the morning.
Important
On Firebase, finish the day's tickets before closing. Anything still on the board when the next day starts is removed, and there is no way to bring it back.
Socket: nothing is cleared automatically
On the Socket channel tickets are stored in your WordPress database and the module never removes them by date. This means:
- a ticket left in On Hold, Preparing or Completed is still on the board the next morning, until the kitchen moves it on;
- every ticket that has been sent stays listed on the POS Sent Orders tab;
- a ticket is removed only when the counter deletes it with Delete on the Kitchen Orders tab. To remove a ticket from Sent Orders, select Back to Hold and then Delete.
Tips
On Socket, end each service with an empty board — send what was served and delete what was not — so the next shift starts clean.
What is written to the WooCommerce order
For a take away order sent through the payment page checkbox, WooCommerce records that the order was sent to the kitchen. Nothing else about the order — its status, its totals, its items — is changed by this module. Order statuses, stock and reports behave exactly as they do without it.
No emails
This module sends no WooCommerce email. There is no kitchen email template and no customer email about preparation. The alerts it does send are ordinary browser notifications on the kitchen board and on the POS screen, and only to a browser where the person allowed notifications.
Next step
If something is not behaving as described here, see Troubleshooting.