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Hold and Fire Courses with Square KDS and Square for Restaurants

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Who is this article for?
This article is for restaurant owners and staff using Square KDS as their kitchen display with Square for Restaurants. Square KDS is included in Square for Restaurants Plus and Premium subscriptions.

Before You Begin

Coursing helps you and your team manage the flow of checks for both the front and back-of-house. Coursing is designed to easily group items, add items, and let the kitchen know when to hold or start firing dishes.

Coursing is an optional setting, so you’ll need to visit your POS device settings on your Square Dashboard to turn on Coursing and Hold/Fire. Make sure that coursing is turned on at your Square for Restaurants point of sale and your KDS. Review setup instructions with the following Support Center articles: 

Fire Courses

Once you’ve enabled coursing and set up your custom-named courses, you can start adding courses to your checks. When you fire a course, your printer stations will automatically print the order ticket to your kitchen or bar and/or the order will appear on your kitchen displays. A held course won't be sent and printed until it's fired from the ticket.

Add items to courses

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

  1. Choose the table that you’d like to create a cheque for or tap New Cheque from the cheque 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 Fire or Hold on the course.
  6. Once you are ready to send your cheque to the kitchen, tap Send.

If you are holding items in a cheque, you can fire them anytime by re-entering the cheque and tapping Hold. Once the button says Fire, you can tap 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.

Edit how courses show up on Square KDS

To edit the coursing format your kitchen prefers on each KDS device:

  1. Open Square KDS.
  2. Tap ≡.
  3. Tap the settings gear icon.
  4. Select Coursing.
  5. Choose between Show fired and held courses or Only show fired courses.

Next Steps

Learn more about routing and printing orders from one of these Support Center articles:


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