Printers — the slips and tickets that keep service moving

A printer in a restaurant is a small workhorse with one job: spit out a piece of paper at exactly the right moment, to exactly the right station, so the kitchen, the bar, or the customer has the slip they need. The page at Admin → Printers is the directory of those workhorses — one entry per physical printer the venue has on the network, with a name, an address, a colour for the route, and a tag that pairs it to the actual machine on the kitchen wall.

This page is for the owner or manager doing the venue’s one-time setup, and for anyone who later adds a printer to a new station. Day-to-day service never touches it; the cook on the line doesn’t even know it exists.

What it does

Most venues that grew up on paper tickets have a quiet, accidental tangle in the kitchen. The hot line uses one printer, the cold line uses another, the bar has its own behind the spirits shelf, the front counter has the receipt printer for the customer. Nobody documented which one is which — they just know “the loud one near the pizza oven prints the pizzas.” When the printer dies, the new one shows up, gets plugged in, and the staff spend a week shouting “is this thing the bar printer or the hot line?”

This page exists so the venue has a single named directory of every printer it owns. Each entry has a Name (the human-readable label — “Bar Printer”, “Pass Printer”, “Hot Line”), an optional Short Name (a three-letter code used on the kitchen display tabs — BAR, PAS, HOT), an Accent Color (the colour that flags routes pointing at this printer everywhere else in the system), and a Device Tag. The tag is the bridge between this digital directory and the actual physical machine: when the venue’s bridge app (the small piece of software that runs locally and talks to the printers on the network) starts up, it discovers the printers on the local network and matches each one to an entry here by tag.

The page itself is intentionally small. Most venues only ever need it twice: once on setup day to add the printers, once a few months later when they add a new one for a new station. Nothing fancy, nothing slow, nothing to learn beyond what each field means.

How to use it

Open Admin → Printers. The page lists every printer currently configured for this venue — each one shown as a card with its colour swatch, name, short-name code, and the device tag in a small monospace pill. Inactive printers (printers you’ve decommissioned but want to keep around for historical reference) show a grey Inactive badge.

To add a printer, click + Add printer at the top right. A small inline form opens with four fields: Name (required), Short Name (optional — a three-to-six character code; defaults to the first two letters of the name), Accent Color (a colour picker — pick something that will read against both light and dark backgrounds), and Device Tag (a kebab-case identifier the bridge app will look for; if you don’t know yet, leave it blank and fill it in when the bridge app reports what tags it discovered). The Active toggle is on by default — only flip it off if you want to keep the record but stop routing tickets here.

Save. The new printer appears in the list, and is immediately available to assign in the kitchen-display routing rules (which is where the actual “this category prints to this printer” decision lives — see the next section).

Editing is the same form, opened from the Edit button on each card. The name, short name, and colour can change at any time without disturbing existing routes. The device tag is the only field where care matters — if you change it, the bridge app stops matching to that physical printer until you also update the bridge’s configuration to use the new tag.

Deleting a printer removes the directory entry but does not, on its own, stop any in-flight tickets — if you still have routing rules pointing at it, those will fail silently until you also clean up the rules. The safer move on a printer you’re retiring is to set it to Inactive rather than deleting it outright.

Where the routing actually happens

The page itself does not decide which order goes to which printer. That decision lives one level deeper, in the kitchen display routing rules. The shape is: each station on the kitchen display (the hot line, the cold line, the bar, the pass) is configured to print to one or more printers from this directory. When the server taps Send on the terminal, every line on the order fans out to the station that handles it, and from there it prints to the assigned printer.

This separation is deliberate. The same printer can serve more than one station (one all-purpose printer for a tiny kitchen). The same station can print to two printers (a redundant pair for a busy line). And changing the routing — “from tomorrow, dessert tickets go to the cold line printer too” — happens on the kitchen-display page without anyone touching this directory.

How big is your setup?

For most kitchens the answer is small. A neighbourhood restaurant with a single chef-de-cuisine on the line typically runs one all-purpose printer for the kitchen and one receipt printer for the front counter — that’s two entries on this page, five minutes of setup, done. The kitchen display routes everything to the kitchen printer, the front-of-house terminal prints receipts to the receipt printer, and nothing else ever needs touching.

A multi-station kitchen — a pizzeria with a separate pizza station, a pasta station, a cold prep, and a dessert pass — wants one printer per station so the slips don’t pile up at one machine and slow service down. That’s four kitchen printers plus a receipt printer plus a bar printer: six entries, maybe ten minutes. Once they’re in, the rest of the kitchen-display setup (which station handles which categories) is the slower job — but it only happens once, and it lives on the kitchen-display page, not here.

Worked example

Marco is setting up a new venue — a small Neapolitan pizzeria with a wood-fired oven station, a cold antipasto bench, and a bar. The hardware came in this morning: two thermal printers for the kitchen, one for the bar, one receipt printer at the front counter.

He opens Admin → Printers and clicks + Add printer. First entry:

Name: Pizza Oven Printer Short Name: OVN Accent Color: a warm red, picked off the swatch Device Tag: pizza-oven-epson-tm-m30 Active: on

He saves. A card appears at the top of the list with the red swatch and the OVN code. Repeats for the cold bench (“Cold Prep Printer”, CLD, green, cold-prep-epson), the bar (“Bar Printer”, BAR, purple, bar-epson), and the receipts (“Receipt Printer”, RCP, grey, front-counter-receipt). Total time: about three minutes.

He then opens the Kitchen Display routing rules and assigns each station to its printer: the Hot Line station prints to Pizza Oven Printer; Cold Line prints to Cold Prep Printer; Bar prints to Bar Printer. The receipt printer doesn’t need a kitchen-display rule — receipts route from the terminal, not the kitchen.

Friday night opens. A customer orders a margherita, a caprese, and a Negroni. The server taps Send. The margherita prints at the wood-fired oven, the caprese prints at the cold bench, the Negroni prints at the bar. Each cook picks up their slip and starts. The customer’s receipt prints at the counter when the bill closes. Nobody at the venue ever thought again about the Printers page; it did its one job and got out of the way.

Kitchen display — where the actual “this station routes to this printer” rules live. The directory on this page provides the printer options the kitchen-display rules choose from.
POS terminal — the surface the server taps Send on. Receipts print to a printer from this directory.
POS overview — the wider picture of how the till, the kitchen display, and the printers fit together during a service.
Team members — only roles with the settings capability can edit the printer directory.