Prioritise orders with Square KDS
About prioritising orders
Prioritising orders and grouping identical items can increase your staff’s efficiency to prep orders faster with the relevant order information available for each kitchen station.
Ticket prioritisation moves entire tickets to the front of the queue. You can prioritise tickets manually by bumping a single ticket to the front, or enable automatic prioritisation to move all prep-complete tickets forward on your Expo station. If you’ve enabled Staggered item prep times, items within a ticket may appear at different times based on their individual prep times – this is separate from prioritisation and does not affect queue order. Learn how to set up Square KDS.
Before you begin
Download the Square KDS app on an Android tablet.
You can prioritise order tickets from your Square KDS app, using an expediter device. Learn how to set up device codes.
You can group identical orders from your Square Dashboard.
Prioritise a ticket
You can manually prioritise tickets and move orders to the front of the queue.
Open your Square KDS app from an expeditor station.
Tap the up arrow ⬆️ icon at the bottom of the ticket you want to prioritise.
A cancel loader will appear to the left of the ‘Prioritising ticket’ message. You will have three seconds to cancel the prioritisation and keep the ticket in its current queue position.
Once the cancel loader timeout, a confirmation message will display on the screen that the order has been sent to all related prep stations.
Automatically move ready tickets to front
You can enable automatic ticket prioritisation on your expo station. When turned on, tickets that are complete at all prep stations automatically move to the front of the Expo queue. This helps your expeditor focus on orders that are ready to serve.
This setting is available on Expo device profiles only and requires Square KDS v7.18.0 or later.
Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Settings > Device management > Kitchen settings > Profiles.
Select your Expo device profile.
Go to Layout > Ticket sequence.
Select Move ready tickets to front.
Select Save.
Once enabled, tickets move to the front of the Expo queue when all assigned prep stations mark them as complete and the Expo station still has remaining work on the ticket.
Group identical items
You can combine identical items. Identical items, such as the same item with identical or no modifications, will be automatically combined together into a single line item on tickets.
Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Settings > Restaurant settings > Kitchen settings > Order settings.
Toggle Combine identical items ON.
Click Save.