The queue at the counter, the riders at the door.

Three queues at once

Lunch at a takeaway is three rushes on top of each other. The counter, with people who want it now. The riders, with their phones out, waiting for Bolt Food and Chowdeck orders. And the phone, with somebody who’ll be there in ten minutes. The kitchen is making all of it at once, and the person at the counter is supposed to keep it all straight.

What goes wrong is rarely the food. It’s the money: an app order counted as cash, a phone order nobody paid for, a rider’s order made twice.

The counter, fast

The menu sits on the till as squares, the extras too. A tap adds each one and the total adds itself up. People pay first here, so the order goes straight to checkout: cash with the change worked out, or MoMo as a prompt on their phone, with the sale closing only when the money arrives. The receipt is a picture you send to their WhatsApp. Every order gets a number, counted per day, so “number 58” is called when it’s ready, not a description of a shirt.

Every app kept apart

Under each sale is a line saying where it came from. It’s In the shop unless you tap it and change it to Takeaway, Pickup, Delivery, or a delivery app by name: Bolt Food, Glovo or Chowdeck.

An app order is checked out as Paid on the app, because the app already has the money. It never counts as cash in your drawer, so the count at closing isn’t thrown out by money that was never there. The report adds up the day by where it came from, so you can see what each app sold and check it against what the app pays you. Selling on Bolt Food, Glovo and Chowdeck goes through keeping them straight.

The kitchen, in order

Turn a tablet into the kitchen’s screen and every order arrives as a ticket: its number, where it’s going and every note. For a takeaway, set the kitchen to hear about an order when it’s paid, so nothing gets cooked for somebody who walked off. The board shows how long the oldest order’s been waiting, and when the kitchen taps Done, the till shows it’s ready.

Phone orders and pickups

When somebody calls ahead, ring the order up, mark it Pickup and set it aside with their name on it. It waits in your tabs. When they arrive, pick it up and take the money.

Running out mid-rush

Mark something sold out and its square greys out, so nobody sells the last milkshake twice. On Pro, stock counts drinks by the bottle and supplies like chicken by the kilo, with each dish drawing on its supply, so you see the chicken running low before it’s gone.

What it doesn’t do yet

It doesn’t take orders from a website, a QR code or the delivery apps directly; the apps’ orders are rung in on the till. It doesn’t print tickets or labels. It doesn’t do combos or discounts like “₵5 off”. And it doesn’t split a bill between friends.