Set Up Coursing with Square for Restaurants

Coursing is a feature built to help you and your team manage the flow of checks for both the front and back of house. Coursing is designed to easily organize and group items, append additional items, and let the kitchen know when to hold or start firing dishes.

Note: Coursing is only available with the Square for Restaurants Plus subscription. Check out the full comparison of features between Square Point of Sale and the Square for Restaurants Free Plan and Plus Plan.

Enable Coursing Management

Coursing is an optional setting, so you’ll need to enable the feature from your online Square Dashboard. To do so:

1. Go to Settings > Devices > POS Devices.

2. Select the relevant Restaurant POS.

3. Scroll down to "Coursing," then toggle on Enable Course Management.

4. You can also toggle on Allow holding and firing of courses so you and your team can send Hold and Fire tickets to the kitchen.

5. Click Save.

Add Courses

Once you’ve enabled coursing and set up your custom-named courses, you can start adding courses to your checks.

To add items to courses from the Square for Restaurants POS app:

1. Choose the table that you’d like to create a check for or tap New Check from the check management screen and choose your table.

2. Tap on the course in the cart to select it.

3. Add all applicable items to the course.

4. You’ll see up to four courses in the cart by default. To add additional courses, tap Add Course.

5. If you have Hold/Fire enabled on the device, the first course is always set to Fire by default, and all subsequent courses are set to Hold. You can alter whether a course should be held or fired by tapping the red Fire or orange Hold on the right end of the course line.

6. Once you are ready to send your check to the kitchen, tap Send.

If you are holding items in a check, you can fire them anytime by re-entering the check and tapping Hold. Once the button says Fire, you can click Send and a “fire” ticket will be sent to the kitchen.

If you need to edit a course, you can either edit or remove the whole course, or edit the course by course line. Once a course is fired, you can still add to it and the kitchen will see the addition as [Course Name] - Addition.

Coursing Printer Settings

When you fire a course, your printer stations will automatically print the order ticket to your kitchen or bar. A held course won't be sent and printed until it's fired from the ticket.

Straight Fire Categories

While you can manually send items and courses to the kitchen to fire, you can also automatically send items in specific categories to your kitchen or bar when you enable the Straight Fire Categories setting for your points of sale.

To enable from your online Square Dashboard:

1. Go to Settings > Devices > Service settings > Courses.

2. Select the applicable categories. Items in the selected categories will not be included as a course to either hold or fire since they’ll be sent straight away to the back-of-house.

3. Click Save.

Note: These settings will only apply when a Restaurant POS device is activated at this location. To change the location, click on the location drop-down menu.

Cart Edit Mode

To edit courses or item details, tap on the item in the cart to enter edit mode. From there you can perform the following actions:

• Move items between courses.

• Repeat, Comp and Void items.

• Modify item details such as variations, dining options, and notes.

Next Steps

• Print Orders in the Kitchen with Square for Restaurants

• Set Up Coursing with Square KDS

• Take orders tableside with Square for Restaurants mobile POS

• Accept orders with Square Online and Square for Restaurants