Send dishes to the right printer
Make each printer a station — starters to the cold section, mains to the grill, drinks to the bar.
If you only have one printer there is nothing to set up here, because everything prints on it. As soon as you have two or more, you will want each one to print only the things its station is responsible for, so that the bar is not producing tickets for desserts it will never make.
Go to Settings → your location → Printers, then Kitchen routing.
How it works
There are two rules to understand, and the second one is the one that catches people out.
The first is that without any routing rules, every printer prints every order in full. That is why a second printer starts out duplicating the first.
The second is that as soon as you route a category or a dish to a printer, that printer becomes a dedicated station and prints only what you have routed to it. It stops printing everything else. So sending “Drinks” to the bar printer does not simply add drinks to what the bar already prints — it also takes away everything that is not a drink. That is almost always what you wanted, but it surprises people who expected to be adding rather than replacing.
The Main printer
The Main printer is where any dish without a rule of its own gets printed. Your first printer becomes the Main printer automatically, and you can move that role to a different printer whenever you like.
It is easiest to think of it as the pass, or as the catch-all. Its real value is that when you add a new dish and forget to route it, the ticket still comes out somewhere instead of disappearing without anybody noticing.
Adding a rule
- Under Kitchen routing, choose the Printer you are setting up.
- Choose what to send to it: a whole Menu, a Category, or a single Dish.
- Click Assign.
You can send the same dish to more than one printer, which is how a steak can print on the grill and at the pass at the same time.
When two rules cover the same dish, the most specific one wins. A rule on a dish beats a rule on its category, and a rule on a category beats a rule on the whole menu. That is what lets you send all of “Desserts” to the pastry section while still sending the one dessert that is plated at the bar to the bar printer, without having to route every other dessert individually.
Check your work
Effective destinations at the bottom of the page lists every dish and the printer it will actually come out on once all of your rules have been applied together. Read it before a service rather than during one, because it is the only place that shows you the end result rather than the individual rules.
There are two warnings to look out for:
- Main printer fallback means the dish has no rule of its own and is going to the Main printer. Often that is exactly right, but it is also how you spot a dish somebody forgot to route.
- Not printed — no active printers means nobody is printing that dish at all. Fix it before service, because the order will still be taken and the kitchen will never see it.
When you remove a printer
Deleting a printer also deletes the routing rules attached to it, and anything that used to print there goes to the Main printer instead. Nothing disappears silently, which is the good news, but whoever is standing at the pass will suddenly be getting a much longer ticket than they expect. Go back into the routing after you delete a printer and reassign those dishes to wherever they should be going now.
Last updated 20 September 2026