Coursing with Square for Restaurants
Coursing is a feature built to help you and your team manage the flow of bills for both the front and back of house. Coursing is designed to easily organise and group items, append additional items and let the kitchen know when to hold or start sending away 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:
Go to Settings > Devices > POS Devices.
Select the relevant Restaurant POS.
Scroll down to ‘Coursing’ then toggle on Enable Course Management.
You can also toggle on Allow holding and away of courses so you and your team can send Hold and Away tickets to the kitchen.
Click Save.
Add Courses
Once you’ve enabled coursing and set up your custom-named courses, you can start adding courses to your bills.
To add items to courses from the Square for Restaurants POS app:
Choose the table that you’d like to create a bill for or tap New Bill from the bill management screen and choose your table.
Tap on the course in the basket to select it.
Add all applicable items to the course.
You’ll see up to four courses in the basket by default. To add additional courses, tap Add Course.
If you have Hold/Away enabled on the device, the first course is always set to Away by default, and all subsequent courses are set to Hold. You can alter whether a course should be held or away by tapping the red Away or orange Hold on the right end of the course line.
Once you’re ready to send your bill to the kitchen, tap Send.
If you’re holding items in a bill, you can fire them anytime by re-entering the bill and tapping Hold. Once the button says Away, you can click Send and an ‘away’ 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 away, you can still add to it and the kitchen will see the addition as [Course Name] – Addition.
Coursing Printer Settings
When you away 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 away from the ticket.
Straight Away Categories
While you can manually send items and courses to the kitchen to away, you can also automatically send items in specific categories to your kitchen or bar when you enable the Straight Away Categories setting for your points of sale.
To enable from your online Square Dashboard:
Go to Settings > Devices > Service settings > Straight Away Categories.
Select the applicable categories. Items in the selected categories will not be included as a course to either hold or away since they’ll be sent straight away to the back of house.
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.
Basket Edit Mode
To edit courses or item details, tap on the item in the basket 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.
Additional Resources
Setting up your points of sale with Square for Restaurants.
Feature comparisons between Square for Restaurants Free, Plus and Premium Plans.
Square KDS guide.