A single order routinely contains work for three different people standing in three different places. The wok cook needs the hot dishes, the larder needs the cold plates, the bar needs the drinks, and none of them needs the other two. Print the whole ticket everywhere and you get three people reading past two-thirds of a docket all night, which is exactly how a dish gets missed.
A print rule has four parts
Routing is configured as rules, and each rule answers four questions:
When does it fire — on sending to the kitchen, on settling the bill, on a reprint.
What does it print — which template. A kitchen docket, a bar label and a customer receipt are different shapes on different paper.
Where does it go — which physical printer, or which KDS screen.
What does it cover — which dish categories. This is the filter that makes the whole thing work.
So “hot dishes → hot kitchen printer, on send” is one rule, and “drinks → bar label printer, on send” is another. Add a station and you add a rule; you do not rebuild the menu.
The fallback matters more than the rules
Every catalogue eventually gets a dish that belongs to no configured category — a seasonal special typed in on a Friday, a new category somebody created last month. If unmatched dishes vanish, you find out from an angry table.
Anything matching no rule routes to a default printer instead. That does not make the routing correct, but it makes the failure visible: the dish comes out somewhere, a human notices it is on the wrong docket, and you fix the category. A silent drop is far more expensive than a misdirected ticket.
Screens, paper, or both
KDS screens and thermal printers are not an either-or. Plenty of kitchens run screens on the hot line, where tickets change and re-order constantly, and keep a printer at the bar because a physical label sticks to the cup. Both can be targets of the same rules.
The receipt printer at the counter and the label printer at the drinks station are genuinely different machines with different paper — 58mm or 80mm receipt rolls at the front, 40×30 or 50×30 labels at the bar. One device does not do both jobs well. Budget for both if you sell drinks to go; see what hardware you actually need.
On the screen itself
A ticket on a KDS shows the table, how long it has been waiting, the dish with its options and any note. Tickets that age past the threshold change colour, so the pass can see at a glance which order is now the problem rather than working strictly first-in-first-out. When a dish is plated it is ticked off; a whole table can be called together when you want to control the pace of service.
