Eight people, one bill, and the request comes at the worst possible moment — when the queue at the door is four deep and the card terminal is the bottleneck. How badly this goes was decided ninety minutes earlier, when the order was taken.
Two ways, and only two
Evenly, by head. The total divides by the number of people and the till produces that many amounts to collect. A second at checkout, no preparation required. This is what most tables actually want, and it is what you should offer first.
By what each person had. The bill splits along the dishes themselves. This is what people ask for when one person had a set menu and another had tap water, and it is fair — but it only works if the system knows which dish belongs to which seat.
The bit that has to happen at the start
Seat-level splitting is not a checkout feature. It is an ordering discipline: when the server takes the order, each dish is attached to a seat number. If that was done, the split is mechanical. If it was not, no software can reconstruct who ate the fish, and you are back to eight people pointing at a printed bill.
So the practical rule for a restaurant that gets this request often — Western-facing dining rooms, hotpot with mixed groups, anywhere with a young crowd — is to order by seat as standard and let the split be a checkout decision. The cost is a couple of extra taps per dish. The saving is not having a fifteen-minute negotiation at the pass on a Saturday night.
What you should not do
Do not wait until the guests ask before deciding. By then the information you need is gone. And do not let a server manually type a split total into the till — that is the same door that price overrides and voids walk through, and it makes the day’s cash impossible to reconcile.
Once the split exists
Each portion of a split bill settles independently and can be paid however that guest likes — cash, card, stored value, or a combination on one portion. Change is calculated per portion, and each settled portion prints its own receipt. See paying part cash, part card for how mixed tenders behave.
Hotpot and barbecue tables are the classic case: a big group, several rounds of ordering over two hours, and a split at the end. If that is your format, order by seat from day one — it is much harder to introduce the habit later.
