The Orderly Handbook

Everything Orderly does, and how to do it — written for the people who actually use it: owners, managers, cashiers, cooks, riders and the platform team.

You don't need to read this front to back. Find your job below and start there.

Start here

Full contents

1. What Orderly is — the five apps, who uses which, how they fit together
2. Your first day — signing in, the screen, finding things, staff logins
3. Building your menu — categories, dishes, sizes, add-ons, availability
4. Online orders — orders from the website and apps, start to finish
5. The POS terminal — taking a walk-in order, step by step
6. POS vs online orders — the difference, explained slowly
7. Tables and reservations — floor plan, tables, bookings, QR ordering
8. Kitchen and display screens — KDS, tickets, stations, customer screen, kiosk
9. Delivery and riders — drivers, zones, dispatch, cash collection
10. Customers and loyalty — customer records, reviews, points
11. Marketing — coupons, offers, banners, free items, broadcasts
12. Reports and money — sales reports, statements, withdrawals, invoices
13. Settings — store profile, hours, order types, payments, printers, staff roles
14. Orderly AI — what it can do, what to say to it, where it lives, what it refuses
15. What your customers see — the storefront, ordering, tracking, the apps
16. Platform administration — running Orderly for many restaurants
17. When something goes wrong — the problems that actually happen
18. Glossary — every word Orderly uses, in plain English

How to read the screenshots

Every screenshot in this handbook is a real screen from a live Orderly install, not a mock-up. The restaurant shown is The Whitney, a test restaurant, so the dishes, prices and order numbers are real examples of what yours will look like — yours will show your own.

Prices are in Kenyan shillings (Ksh / KES) because that's how this install is configured. If your restaurant uses another currency, Orderly shows yours.

A note on words

Orderly uses a few words in a specific way. If a sentence doesn't make sense, check the glossary — it's probably one of these:

• Merchant — one restaurant. If you own three branches, that's three merchants.
• Backoffice — the admin website where you run the restaurant (menu, orders, reports).
• Storefront — the public website where customers order from you.
• KOT — Kitchen Order Ticket. The slip the kitchen works from.
• KDS / ODS / KSK — Kitchen Display, Order Display (customer-facing), Kiosk.

What Orderly is

Orderly is a restaurant platform. One system that takes the order, tells the kitchen, takes the money, sends the rider, and tells you at the end of the day what happened.

It is not one app. It is a family of screens, each built for one job and one kind of person, all reading and writing the same set of orders.

1.1 The screens

All of them talk to the same place. An order taken on the kiosk, an order placed on the website and an order rung up at the till all land in the same Orders list, hit the same kitchen screen, and count in the same report.

1.2 How an order actually moves

This is the spine of the whole system. Everything else in this handbook hangs off it.

   Customer                     You                     Kitchen              Rider
      │                          │                         │                   │
 places order ──────────────►  ORDER                        │                   │
 (web / app / kiosk /           │                          │                   │
  QR / phone / counter)         │                          │                   │
                                ├── you accept it ────────►│  ticket appears   │
                                │                          │  on the KDS       │
                                │                     cook it                  │
                                │◄──── mark ready ─────────┤                   │
                                │                                              │
                          pickup? ── customer collects                         │
                          delivery? ── assign rider ──────────────────────────►│
                                                                          delivers
                                │◄──────────────── delivered ──────────────────┤
                             COMPLETE

Every step in that diagram changes the order's status, and every status change is visible to the customer on their tracking screen. That is why keeping statuses up to date matters more than almost anything else you do in Orderly: it is the difference between a customer who waits calmly and a customer who phones you.

1.3 The order statuses

These are the words Orderly uses. They appear on your Orders list, on the kitchen screen, and on the customer's phone.

1.4 Who can see what

Orderly separates people by role. A role is a list of screens and buttons a person is allowed to use.

• Main account — the owner. Sees everything for their restaurant.
• Staff accounts — cashier, waiter, kitchen, manager. See only what their role allows. A cashier can ring up an order but may not be able to see the profit reports or change prices.
• Platform admin — the Orderly team. Sees every restaurant on the platform, the plans, the commissions and the global settings. See chapter 16.

You create staff logins yourself under Users & Roles. See chapter 13.

The rule that matters: everyone gets their own login. Never share one. Orderly records who took each order, who voided it and who changed a price — that record is worthless if three people use the same account.

1.5 Where Orderly AI fits

Orderly has an assistant built in, called Orderly AI. It is not a separate product and not a chatbot bolted on the side — it can read your live orders, your menu, your tables and your sales, and (with your confirmation) change things.

It appears as an orange circle on nearly every screen. You'll see it in the bottom-right corner of the screenshots throughout this handbook.

The whole of chapter 14 is about it: what it can do for each role, exactly what to type, and what it will refuse to do. Individual chapters also carry Ask Orderly AI boxes showing the fastest way to do that chapter's job by just asking.

Ask Orderly AI

• "What can you do?"
• "How were sales today?"

Your first day

This chapter gets you from "I have a login" to "I know where everything is."

2.1 Signing in

There are two different sign-in pages, and using the wrong one is the single most common first-day problem.

If you type your restaurant username into the Administrator page it will say "Incorrect username or password" even though your password is perfectly correct. Check the heading on the page says Merchant Login first.

On the page:

• Username / Password — what your manager or Orderly gave you.
• Remember me — keep the tab signed in on a device only you use. Never tick this on a shared service tablet.
• Forgot password? — sends a reset to the email on the account.
• Sign in with a passkey — if your device supports Face ID, a fingerprint or a security key, you can register it once and then sign in without typing a password at all. Faster and safer on a busy floor.

Tablet tip: on the service tablet, sign in once at open and leave the tab open all day. Orderly is built to sit open through a whole service.

2.2 The screen, explained

Everything in the backoffice uses this same frame:

Left — the sidebar. Every section of Orderly. Sections with a › open into sub-pages when you click them. On a phone the sidebar hides behind the menu button.

Top — the bar. From left:

• POS — jumps straight to the till. The fastest route when a customer walks in.
• Orders — jumps to live orders.
• View Website — opens your public storefront in a new tab, exactly as a customer sees it. Use this after every menu change.
• Search — searches orders and menu items. Press / to jump into it from anywhere.
• Moon icon — dark mode.
• Orange circle — Orderly AI. See chapter 14.
• Speech bubble — customer chats.
• Bell — notifications, with a count of unread ones.
• Your name — profile, and sign out.

Middle — the page itself.

2.3 The dashboard, number by number

The dashboard is the first thing you see. Read it left to right:

The four big tiles

• Today's Orders — how many orders today, split into Online and POS. That split is worth watching: it tells you whether your business is walk-in or internet, and it changes what you should be spending your time on.
• Today's Sales — money taken today, again split Online / POS.
• Average Order — sales ÷ completed orders. If this drops, people are buying less per visit; add-ons and combos are the fix.
• Pending Orders — orders waiting for you to act. This number should be zero almost all the time. If it isn't, someone is waiting.

The status strip — Pending, Preparing, Ready, On the way, Completed, Cancelled. A live count of where everything currently is. Click any of them to see those orders.

Sales Overview — revenue over 6 months, 1 year, or year-to-date.

Last Orders — the last ten, with filters for All / Online / POS / Completed / Cancelled. The eye icon opens the order; the download icon gets the receipt.

Right column — Top Customers (who to look after), Reviews (your star breakdown), Top Selling (last 30 days), and Today's Reservations.

Today's Highlights — the bottom strip writes the day out in words: whether sales moved against yesterday, new reviews, best seller, and how many orders are waiting for acceptance.

Ask Orderly AI

• "How were sales today?"
• "How does today compare to yesterday?"
• "What's my best seller this month?"

2.4 The map of the sidebar

Here is the whole backoffice in one table, so you know where to look before you go hunting. Each row links to the chapter that explains it.

2.5 Setting up, in the right order

If the restaurant is brand new, do it in this order. Each step depends on the one before it.

1. Store Profile → Merchant Information — name, logo, cover photo, address, phone. This is what customers see.
2. Store Profile → Settings → Store Hours — when you're open. Customers can't order outside these hours, so getting this wrong looks like the site is broken.
3. Order Types & Payments — decide whether you do Delivery, Pickup, Dine-in, or all three, and turn on the payment methods you accept.
4. Menu Attributes → Size — set up your size names (Full, ½, ¼…) before you add dishes, so you can attach them as you go.
5. Menu → Category — Breakfast, Main Dish, Cold Beverages, and so on.
6. Menu → Items — the dishes themselves. This is the big one. See chapter 3.
7. Tables & Reservations → Tables — if you have a dining room.
8. Users & Roles — logins for your staff.
9. Printers — if you print tickets or receipts.
10. View Website — look at your own storefront and order something. Do this before you tell a single customer about it.

Ask Orderly AI

• "Is my store open right now?"
• "How many items are on my menu?"

Building your menu

Your menu is the product. Everything else in Orderly — the POS, the kitchen screen, the reports — is built on top of it. Time spent here pays back every day.

Where: sidebar → Menu

3.1 The order to build things in

Orderly's menu has four layers, and each one needs the one above it:

  Sizes & Ingredients   (Menu Attributes)   ← set up once
          ↓
      Categories         (Menu → Category)  ← the sections of your menu
          ↓
        Items            (Menu → Items)     ← the dishes
          ↓
   Add-on groups & items (Menu → Addon…)    ← the extras customers pick

Do them in that order and you'll never have to go back and redo anything.

3.2 Sizes, ingredients and cooking references

Where: sidebar → Menu Attributes

These are the reusable building blocks. Set them up first.

• Size — the portion names you sell in: Full, ¾, ½, ¼, or Small, Medium, Large, or 300ml, 500ml, 1L. You define the names here once; the price for each size is set per dish, so "Large" can cost different amounts on different dishes.
• Ingredients — labels shown to the customer ("contains peanuts", "beef", "vegetarian"). These are descriptive only; they do not deduct stock.
• Cooking Reference — doneness options like rare / medium / well done.

3.3 Categories

Where: Menu → Category

Categories are the sections customers scroll through: Breakfast, Breakfast Snacks, Cold Beverages, Extras, Fast Food, Main Dish, Soft Drinks.

Adding one

1. Add new.
2. Name it the way a customer would say it, not the way your kitchen files it. "Cold Beverages", not "BEV-COLD".
3. Add an image if you want it to show as a tile on the storefront.
4. Set the sort order — this is the order customers see. Put your money-makers near the top.
5. Save.

Category Availability lets a whole section switch on and off by time of day. Use it so Breakfast disappears at 11am instead of taking orders you can't cook.

Keep the number of categories small. Seven sections a customer can scan beats twenty they have to hunt through.

3.4 Items — the dishes

Where: Menu → Items

The list gives you, per dish: a photo, an Available toggle, the name with a Publish badge, when it was last changed, its category, its price, and Edit / Delete buttons.

At the top: Add new, Sort (drag dishes into the order customers see), Upload Bulk (import many dishes from a spreadsheet), a search box, and Export to Excel, CSV, PDF or Print — useful for giving a printed menu to a designer, or checking prices away from a screen.

3.4.1 Adding a dish

1. Add new.
2. Name — what the customer reads. "Cheese Beef Burger."
3. Description — one or two lines, concrete. "Our classic beef burger topped with a generous slice of melted cheese. Pure comfort." Say what's in it and what it's like. Avoid adjectives with no content ("delicious").
4. Photo — the single biggest lever on how much a dish sells. Bright, square, food filling the frame, shot from above or at 45°. One consistent style across the menu beats one great photo and twenty bad ones.
5. Category — where it lives on the menu.
6. Price — see sizes below.
7. Preparation time — how many minutes it takes. Orderly uses this to promise the customer a time. If you inflate it, you look slow; if you shave it, you look late. Be honest.
8. Save.

3.4.2 The tabs on a dish

Once a dish exists, opening it gives you a row of tabs. This is where most of Orderly's menu power lives:

There's also Duplicate, which copies a whole dish — the fastest way to add "Chicken Burger" once "Beef Burger" exists.

3.4.3 Sizes and prices

If a dish comes in portions, add each size with its own price rather than making four separate dishes. The customer then sees one dish with size buttons:

That screen also shows two things worth knowing about:

• Special Instructions — a free-text box where the customer types "no onions". It arrives on the kitchen ticket. Read it.
• If sold out — the customer chooses in advance what should happen if you can't make it: go with your recommendation, contact them, or cancel the item. This saves phone calls.
• "Buy this item to earn 92 Points" — your loyalty scheme, shown at the point of decision. See chapter 11.

3.5 Add-ons — extras and choices

Where: Menu → Addon Category, then Addon Items

Add-ons are how a customer customises a dish, and how you raise the average order value without selling more dishes.

Two levels:

1. Addon Category — the group, e.g. "Choose your drink", "Extra toppings", "Sauce". On the group you set:
2. Whether the customer must pick one (required) or may skip it (optional).
3. How many they may pick (exactly one, up to three, unlimited).
4. Addon Items — the options in that group, each with its own price. "Extra cheese +50", "Chips +150", "No sauce +0".

Then, on each dish, attach the groups that apply to it.

A worked example. Burger → attach "Extra toppings" (optional, pick up to 3: cheese 50, bacon 100, egg 40) and "Choose a side" (required, pick 1: chips 150, salad 100, none 0). Now every burger order asks two useful questions and most of them add 50–150 shillings.

3.6 Turning dishes on and off during service

This is the thing you'll do most often, so it has three routes:

1. Menu → Items — flip the Available toggle in the list. Instant.
2. Menu → Items Availability — a single screen listing everything with its toggle. Best for the pre-service sweep: run down it once at open.
3. Ask Orderly AI — fastest during service, because you don't have to leave what you're doing.

When a dish is unavailable, it stays visible on your menu but can't be ordered — customers see it greyed out. That is deliberate: it tells them you normally have it, so they come back.

Ask Orderly AI

• "We're out of Hot Chocolate — take it off the menu"
• "Put Roasted Chicken back on"
• "What's currently marked unavailable?"

Any change like this asks you to confirm before it happens:

3.7 Publish vs Available

Two different switches that people confuse:

Unpublish the pumpkin soup in December. Mark it unavailable when you run out on a Tuesday.

3.8 Stock and suppliers

Where: sidebar → Inventory → Suppliers

Orderly keeps a supplier list — names, contacts, what you buy from whom — and each dish has an Inventory tab where you can hold a stock count.

Be clear about what this is and isn't. It counts dishes, not ingredients. Setting Beef Burger to 20 means Orderly stops selling burgers after 20; it does not know that each burger used a bun and a patty. For a kitchen, the practical use is limited-run items: the 12 portions of fish you bought this morning.

Ask Orderly AI

• "How many Beef Burgers do I have left?"
• "Set Beef Burger stock to 20"

3.9 Bulk changes

• Upload Bulk (on the item list) — build the menu in a spreadsheet and import it. The right way to open a new branch.
• Sort — drag to reorder. Do this deliberately: the first three items in a category get ordered far more than the last three.
• Export — Excel / CSV / PDF / Print, for price reviews and printed menus.

3.10 A weekly menu routine

• Every morning: run down Items Availability, switch on what you have, switch off what you don't.
• Every week: open Reports → Sales and look at what isn't selling. A dish that sells nothing is taking up a slot a better dish could have.
• Every month: check prices against costs, and re-shoot the photo of anything selling below what it should.

Online orders

An online order is one the customer placed themselves — on your website, in the app, from the kiosk, or by scanning the QR code on their table. Nobody on your staff typed it.

That one fact drives everything in this chapter. The customer is not standing in front of you, so:

• They are waiting somewhere else and can see the status you set.
• They may have already paid, before you've even seen the order.
• You have to accept or reject it — they don't know yet whether you said yes.

If that's clear, the rest is easy. If it isn't, read chapter 6 first, which spells out the difference between this and a till order.

Where: sidebar → Orders

4.1 The three order screens

Live Orders has tabs across the top with live counts: All, Pending, Preparing, Ready, On the way. During service, that top row is your whole job. When Pending isn't zero, someone is waiting for you to say yes.

The table shows Order ID, Origin (WEB or POS), Customer, Type (Delivery / Pickup / Dine-in), Payment, Total, Status, Time and Actions. You can search by order ID, restaurant or customer name, filter by type, change how many rows show at once, and Export the list.

4.2 What to do when an order arrives

An order lands with a sound and a notification. Here's the loop:

Step 1 — Accept it (or reject it)

A new order sits at Pending doing nothing until you act. Open it and choose:

• Accept — you're making it. The customer is told, and the clock starts.
• Reject — you're not. You pick a reason from a list (closed, item unavailable, outside delivery area, too busy). The customer is told the reason, and if they paid, the refund process starts.

Accept fast. The single biggest complaint customers have about online food ordering is silence after paying. Ten seconds of your attention removes it.

Step 2 — Send it to the kitchen

Depending on your setup this is automatic or one tap. The order becomes a KOT (Kitchen Order Ticket) and appears on the kitchen screen or prints. See chapter 8.

Step 3 — Mark it Preparing

The kitchen has started. The customer's tracker moves.

Step 4 — Mark it Ready

Cooked and at the pass. What happens next depends on the order type:

• Pickup — the customer is told to come and collect. Their number goes up on the customer display screen if you have one.
• Delivery — assign a rider (or Orderly assigns one automatically, if you've set that up). See chapter 9.
• Dine-in — take it to the table and mark Served.

Step 5 — Complete it

Delivered, collected or served, and paid. Complete is the end state.

If you're running late, set the order to Delayed rather than saying nothing. The customer sees it and, in most cases, waits. Silence is what turns a late order into a bad review.

4.3 Reading an order

Every order page has the same anatomy:

Top left — the order. Number (#10110), status badge (complete), and when it was placed.

Customer. Name, phone, email. If the order came from a kiosk or a counter you'll see "Counter order" with a generated address — that's normal, it means nobody typed a customer in.

Loyalty Points. What this order earns them. See chapter 11.

The details table.

• Order type — Pickup, Delivery or Dine-in.
• Delivery Date/Time — "Asap", or a scheduled time.
• Include utensils — yes/no, if you ask that.
• Payment — the method: cash, card, M-Pesa, wallet.
• Payment status — Paid or unpaid. Read this one carefully before you hand food over.

Payment history. Every attempt against this order, with the gateway reference. This is your evidence in a dispute: date, method, description, amount, status, and the reference number the payment processor gave.

Summary (right). Every line item with its size and category, then:

• Sub total — the food.
• Service fee — your fixed charge, if you use one.
• Total VAT (16%) — tax. Note this is inclusive in this configuration: the VAT is already inside the prices customers see, and this line shows how much of the total it is. It is not added on top.
• Total — what the customer pays.

Print — a receipt or a copy of the order.

4.4 Scheduled orders

Where: Orders → Scheduled

Customers can order now for later — lunch at 1pm, a party order on Saturday. These do not appear in Live Orders until their time approaches.

Check this screen at open, every day. A twenty-portion order for 1pm is a completely different day than the one you were planning.

4.5 Order History

Where: Orders → Order History

Everything that finished. Search by order number, customer name or date range, filter by status and type, and export.

This is where you go when:

• A customer says "I ordered on Tuesday and it was wrong."
• You're checking whether a refund went through.
• You're counting what happened last month by hand rather than trusting a chart.

4.6 Where online orders come from

All of these arrive in the same list, and the Origin column tells you which:

4.7 A service-time discipline

Print this and stick it by the tablet:

1. Sound on, tab open, volume up. Orderly can't reach you through a locked screen.
2. Accept within a minute. Every time.
3. Statuses stay current. Preparing when it's on, Ready when it's up.
4. Delayed beats silent. Always.
5. Check Payment status before food leaves. Paid, or you're collecting cash.
6. Zero pending at close. Nothing left hanging overnight.

Ask Orderly AI

• "What orders are still preparing?"
• "Show me today's orders"
• "Show me order 10110"
• "How many orders are waiting for me to accept?"

The POS terminal

The POS ("point of sale") is the till. It's the screen you use when a person is standing in front of you, or sitting at a table, and you are typing their order for them.

It is built for a tablet: big buttons, no small text, works with wet or gloved hands. It also works fine on a laptop.

Where: sidebar → POS → POS Terminal, or the POS button in the top bar from anywhere.

New to this? Read chapter 6 first — it explains when to use the POS and when not to, which matters more than which button to press.

5.1 The screen

Two halves.

Left — the menu.

• Quick search items… — type two or three letters and the grid filters. Faster than hunting, especially on a long menu. Learn this first.
• Category tabs — All, Breakfast, Breakfast Snacks, Cold Beverages, Extras, Fast Food, and so on.
• The grid — every dish as a button, with its price.
• Two small buttons on the right of the tabs — switch between a dense text grid and a grid with photos. Text is faster once you know the menu; photos help new staff.

Right — the current order. This is the customer's bill as you build it. Top to bottom:

• Order type button — the big orange one. Dinein, Pickup or Delivery.
• Walk-In Customer — who this is for.
• Select table… — which table they're at (dine-in).
• Now / Schedule for later — when they want it.
• The items you've added, each with − 1 + and a bin icon.
• The totals — sub total, service fee, VAT, total.
• ADJUSTMENTS — four small icons: discount, void/no-charge, timing, and extras.
• Send KOT, Bill, Bill & Pay, Hold — the four ways to finish.
• Reset Order — throw the whole thing away and start again.

5.2 Taking an order, one step at a time

We'll ring up a real order: one Cheese Beef Burger, dine-in, at table 3.

Step 1 — Choose the order type

Tap the big button at the top of the right panel and set Dinein, Pickup or Delivery. Do this first, before adding food, because it decides whether Orderly asks you for a table or an address, and how much (if anything) it charges for delivery.

Step 2 — Find the dish

Either tap the Fast Food category tab, or type bur into Quick search items….

Step 3 — Tap the dish

Tapping opens a small window for that dish:

On it:

• The price — Ksh 300.00.
• Special Instructions — type what the customer actually said. "No pickles, extra sauce on the side." This is printed on the kitchen ticket. Use it. A cook who can read the request doesn't have to guess.
• Quantity — the − 1 + control at the bottom left. Two burgers? Tap + once.
• Add to Order — the orange button, showing the running price.

If the dish has sizes (Full / ¾ / ½ / ¼) or add-ons (extra cheese, choose a side), they appear here too. Pick them before adding.

Step 4 — It's in the bill

The dish appears on the right with its quantity and price. To change it:

• − and + change the quantity.
• The bin icon removes the line entirely.

Step 5 — Add everything else

Tap All to get back to the whole menu, or use search. Repeat step 3 for each item.

Watch the totals block build as you go:

• Sub total — the food.
• Service fee — your fixed charge, if you have one.
• Total VAT (16%) — the tax already included in those prices.
• Total — what to charge.

Read the total back to the customer before you take money. It catches mistakes while they're still free to fix.

Step 6 — Who is it for?

Tap Walk-In Customer to attach a real customer instead. Search by name or phone; if they're new, add them. Do this when:

• They're a regular (their history and points follow them).
• It's a delivery (you need the address).
• It's a big or unusual order you may need to look up later.

For a stranger buying a coffee, leave it as Walk-In. Don't slow the queue down.

Step 7 — Which table?

For dine-in, tap Select table…:

You get the room ("Main Seating area"), a legend, and filters: All, Available, Occupied, Reserved, Cleaning, Unavailable. Each table shows its name, how many seats, which area, and its current state.

Tap a free table, then Confirm. Or tap Take-out if they've changed their mind and want it to go.

The table then shows as occupied on your floor plan and to everyone else on the system — that's how two waiters avoid seating the same table twice.

Step 8 — Now, or later?

Now is the default. Schedule for later lets you set a time — for the customer who orders at 11 and wants to eat at 1.

Step 9 — Adjustments (only when you need them)

The four small icons on the ADJUSTMENTS row cover discounts, voiding a line, timing, and extra charges. Your role decides which of them you can use — a cashier usually can't discount without a manager. That's deliberate: discounts are where money quietly leaves a restaurant.

Step 10 — Finish it

Four buttons, and choosing the right one is the whole skill of running a POS:

For our dine-in burger: Send KOT now, and Bill & Pay when they're done.

Step 11 — Take the money

Bill & Pay asks how they're paying — cash, card, M-Pesa, wallet, or split between several. For M-Pesa you enter their phone number and send the prompt; the screen updates when they pay. For cash, enter what they handed you and Orderly works out the change.

Once payment is recorded, the order closes and appears in Order History.

5.3 Held orders and open tables

Where: POS → Open Orders

Everything you parked with Hold, and every dine-in table with food fired but not yet paid. This is your list of "money not yet collected."

Tap one to bring it back to the terminal: add a round of drinks, or take payment.

Check this screen before you close. An order still sitting here at the end of the night is either a table that walked out without paying or a mistake nobody cleared. Both are worth knowing about tonight rather than next week.

5.4 POS Dashboard and Order History

• POS → Dashboard — how the till specifically is doing today: sales, order count, what's selling. Separate from the main dashboard, which mixes in online.
• POS → Order History — every order this terminal has taken. Search, reprint receipts, find a transaction from three days ago.

5.5 Habits that make the POS fast

1. Learn the search box. Three letters beats three taps every time.
2. Set the order type first. It changes what else you're asked for.
3. Type the special instructions. Say it in the customer's words, not yours.
4. Read the total back. Free to fix now, expensive to fix later.
5. Hold, don't cancel. If a customer wavers, park the order.
6. One login per person. Your name is on every order you take.
7. Clear Open Orders at close. Every night.

5.6 Things people get wrong

"I made a mistake after sending the KOT." The kitchen already has it. Don't just edit the screen — tell the kitchen, then fix the order.

"The customer wants to split the bill." Take payment in parts on the payment screen; Orderly can record more than one payment against one order.

"I hit Reset Order by accident." It's gone. That's what it's for. Rebuild it — and this is why you read the total back before finishing, not after.

"An order is in Open Orders and I don't know whose it is." Open it: the items, the table and the time will tell you. If the table is empty and the food was collected, take payment or void it with a manager.

Ask Orderly AI

• "What tables are free for 2?"
• "How many POS orders have we done today?"
• "What's the total on table 4?"

POS orders vs online orders

This is the chapter to read on your first day, and the one to hand a new employee. Nearly every mistake people make in Orderly comes from not being clear about this one thing.

Take it slowly. Nothing here is complicated, but it is easy to be fuzzy about, and fuzzy is where mistakes live.

6.1 The one-sentence version

A POS order is one YOU typed. An online order is one the CUSTOMER typed.

That's it. That is the entire difference. Everything below is just the consequences of that one fact.

6.2 Say it again, with pictures

A POS order

Someone walks into your restaurant. They stand at the counter. They say "one cheese burger and a Coke."

You pick up the tablet. You tap Cheese Beef Burger. You tap Coke. You tell them "that's Ksh 380." You take their money.

The customer never touched a screen. They talked to a human — you.

That is a POS order. In Orderly it shows up with a POS label and an order number like POS-10105.

An online order

Someone is at home. They open your website on their phone. They tap Cheese Beef Burger. They tap Coke. They type their address. They pay with M-Pesa. They press "Place order."

Nobody on your staff was involved. The first you know about it is a notification.

That is an online order. It shows up with a WEB label and an order number like #10110.

6.3 Why it matters: the four real differences

Difference 1 — Who is waiting, and where

This is the big one.

With a POS order, if the food is late, the customer can see the kitchen. They can see you're busy. They can ask you.

With an online order, the customer sees nothing except the status you set in Orderly. If you don't move the order from Accepted to Preparing to Ready, their phone says nothing changed for forty minutes and they assume you've forgotten them.

What this means for you: on a POS order, updating statuses is housekeeping. On an online order, updating statuses is customer service. It's the only way you're talking to them.

Difference 2 — Accepting

A POS order is already accepted — you typed it, so obviously you agreed to make it.

An online order arrives as Pending and does nothing at all until you accept it. The customer has ordered and possibly paid, and is now sitting there waiting to find out whether you even exist.

What this means for you: the Pending count on your dashboard should be zero nearly all of the time. If it isn't, a real person is waiting for you to say yes.

Difference 3 — Money

On a POS order you press Bill & Pay, take cash or send an M-Pesa prompt, and you know exactly when the money arrived because you were there.

On an online order the payment already happened through the payment gateway. The order arrives marked Paid. Nobody needs to do anything.

What this means for you: on an online order, check the Payment status before food leaves the building. If it says Paid, you're done — do not ask the customer or the rider for money again. If it says unpaid, it's cash-on-delivery, and the rider collects.

Difference 4 — Who the customer is

What this means for you: if a regular is standing at your counter, take the extra five seconds to attach their customer record on the POS. Otherwise their points don't accrue and their history doesn't build.

6.4 The full comparison, on one page

6.5 The confusions that actually happen

"An order came in but I didn't type it — did someone else?" No. It's an online order. Check Orders → Live Orders. Accept it.

"The customer says they already paid but I haven't taken any money." Correct, and normal. They paid online. Open the order and look at Payment status. If it says Paid, hand over the food.

"Do I have to type online orders into the POS as well?" No. Never do this. It creates the same order twice: two tickets in the kitchen, two amounts in your sales figures, and a night spent working out why the numbers are wrong. Online orders are already in the system.

"A customer at the counter wants to pay with M-Pesa. Is that a POS or online order?" POS. You are typing it. How they pay doesn't change who typed it — the POS takes M-Pesa too.

"Someone at table 6 scanned the QR code and ordered from their phone. Which is it?" Online. They typed it. It arrives in Live Orders with their table number on it. You accept it like any other online order — you just don't have to deliver it anywhere.

"My sales don't match — the dashboard shows more than my till." The dashboard shows Online + POS. Your cash drawer is only the cash part of POS. The dashboard splits the two for exactly this reason: look at the POS number for the till, and the Online number for money that arrived in your account.

"An old order is still sitting in Open Orders." That's a POS order you fired but never took payment for. Either the table left without paying or someone forgot to close it. Clear it before you go home.

6.6 Two worked days

A restaurant that is mostly walk-in

You'll spend the day in POS → POS Terminal. Your rhythm: customer arrives → type the order → Send KOT or Bill & Pay → next customer. Check Open Orders for tables still eating. Glance at Live Orders now and then in case something came in from the website.

A restaurant that is mostly delivery

You'll spend the day in Orders → Live Orders. Your rhythm: notification → accept within a minute → kitchen → mark Preparing → mark Ready → assign a rider → watch it complete. You may barely touch the POS at all.

Most restaurants are both, which is why the dashboard splits Today's Orders into Online and POS. That split is the single most useful number on the screen: it tells you which of these two days you're actually having.

6.7 If you remember five things

1. POS = you typed it. Online = they typed it.
2. Online orders must be accepted. Fast.
3. On an online order, the status IS the conversation with the customer.
4. Check Payment status before food leaves. Online orders are usually already paid.
5. Never re-type an online order into the POS.

Ask Orderly AI

• "How many orders came from the website today, and how many from the till?"
• "Are any orders waiting for me to accept?"

Tables and reservations

If you have a dining room, this is where you run it: who's sitting where, who's booked in, and how the QR codes on the tables work.

Where: sidebar → Tables & Reservations

7.1 The Floor Plan

Where: Tables & Reservations → Floor Plan

The live picture of your dining room. Along the top: free, occupied, and to check. Below that, your rooms, and every table as a tile with its name, seat count and state.

Two behaviours worth knowing, stated on the screen itself:

• Tables free themselves when the order closes. You don't have to clear a table by hand — take payment and the table goes green.
• After 90 minutes they ask to be checked. A table that's been occupied a long time flags itself as to check, so a forgotten table gets noticed instead of silently staying "occupied" all night.

Tapping a table lets you seat it, start an order on it, or change its state.

7.2 Tables

Where: Tables & Reservations → Tables

The list of every table. For each one you set:

• Name or number — what staff call it. Use what they actually say: "5", "high table", "terrace 2".
• Seats — how many people fit. Reservations use this to place bookings.
• Room / area — which room it's in.
• Status — Available, Occupied, Reserved, Cleaning, Unavailable.

There's also Generate Table for creating a batch at once (tables 1–20 in one go) rather than adding twenty by hand.

Each table can produce a QR code — see 7.5.

Ask Orderly AI

• "What tables are free for 2?"
• "Is table 5 occupied?"
• "Mark table 3 as cleaning"

7.3 Rooms

Where: Tables & Reservations → Room

Rooms group tables: Main Seating area, Terrace, Private Room, Upstairs. Two reasons to use them:

1. The floor plan and table picker stay readable when you have thirty tables.
2. You can send different rooms to different kitchen stations, or price them differently.

7.4 Reservations

Where: Tables & Reservations → Reservations

Bookings — from the phone, from your website, or typed in by you.

A reservation holds a name, phone, party size, date and time, table, and notes ("birthday", "wheelchair access", "window if possible"). Reservations move through statuses of their own: booked, seated, completed, cancelled, no-show.

Related screens:

• Shifts — your service windows (lunch 12:00–15:00, dinner 18:00–22:30). Customers can only book inside a shift. This is what stops someone booking a table for 4am.
• Settings — how far ahead people can book, how long a table is held before a no-show, whether bookings need confirming, and the cancellation reasons you offer.
• Time Slots — finer control over exactly which times are bookable.

The daily habit: open Reservations at the start of each shift and read it out to the floor. A twelve-person booking at 19:30 changes how you lay up.

7.5 Tableside ordering (the QR code on the table)

This is one of the most useful things Orderly does, and one of the least understood.

How it works for the customer:

1. They sit down.
2. They scan the QR code on the table with their phone camera.
3. Your menu opens in their browser — no app to install.
4. They order and (optionally) pay, right there.

How it works for you:

The order arrives in Orders → Live Orders like any other online order, with the table number already on it. You accept it, the kitchen cooks it, and a waiter carries it to that table.

Setting it up:

1. Tables & Reservations → Tables — make sure every table exists with the right name.
2. Tableside QR Code Configuration — set what the QR codes should do.
3. View Table QR Code — get the code for each table. Print them, laminate them, or put them in the table stands.

Why it's worth doing:

• A table can order a second round without waiting for a waiter to be free.
• The order goes straight to the kitchen — no writing, no re-typing, no mishearing.
• It costs you nothing per order.

Call Staff is a related feature: the customer can tap a button to ask for help, water or the bill, and it alerts your floor. The list of things they're allowed to ask for is configurable.

Remember: a tableside order is an online order, not a POS order. The customer typed it. It needs accepting like any other. See chapter 6.

7.6 How tables, orders and the POS fit together

   Customer sits at table 3
            │
   ┌────────┴─────────┐
   │                  │
 waiter takes      customer scans
 order on POS      QR on the table
   │                  │
 select table 3    table 3 is
 on the POS        already known
   │                  │
   └────────┬─────────┘
            │
      Order attached to table 3
            │
      Floor plan shows 3 as occupied
            │
      Kitchen cooks, food goes to table 3
            │
      Payment taken → order closes
            │
      Table 3 goes green again automatically

Both routes end in the same place. That's the point: the floor plan is true whichever way the order was taken.

Kitchen and display screens

Orderly drives four different screens in and around the kitchen. They do different jobs and they're easy to mix up, so here they are in one place:

Where: sidebar → Displays, and sidebar → Kitchen Operations

8.1 Kitchen Operations

Dashboard

Where: Kitchen Operations → Dashboard

How the kitchen is doing right now: how many tickets are open, how long they've been open, what's late. The manager's view of the pass.

Tickets (KOT)

Where: Kitchen Operations → Tickets (KOT)

KOT stands for Kitchen Order Ticket — the kitchen's copy of an order. When an order is sent to the kitchen, Orderly creates a KOT from it.

The screen tracks tickets per item or per group, with:

• Kitchen Station — filter to one station (see below).
• Search KOT / Order — find a specific ticket by number.
• Tabs with live counts: All, Pending, Preparing, Ready, Served, Cancelled.
• A date selector, defaulting to Today.

A ticket moves Pending → Preparing → Ready → Served. If something has to be killed, you cancel it and pick a reason from a configured list — which is how you find out later that you're cancelling six things a week for the same reason.

Stations

Where: Kitchen Operations → Stations

A station is a part of your kitchen: grill, fryer, cold larder, bar, desserts. You assign menu items to stations, and then each station's screen only shows what that station has to make.

This is what stops the salad section reading a wall of burger tickets. In a small kitchen one station is fine. From about three cooks up, stations start earning their keep.

8.2 The Kitchen Display (KDS)

Where: Displays → Screens, tab Kitchen Display

The Screens page manages every display you run, with a live Online / Offline count so you know whether the screen in the kitchen is actually connected.

Each display is a card with its name ("Default Kitchen"), how many active orders it has, a green dot when it's live, and Open Screen.

Open Screen opens the display itself — put that on the screen in the kitchen, full-screen it, and leave it. It updates live; nobody needs to refresh.

There's also a standalone kitchen app at kitchen.orderly.co.ke, which cooks sign into on a tablet:

Working from the KDS:

• Tickets appear as orders are sent to the kitchen, oldest first.
• Each ticket shows the order number, table or type, items, sizes, quantities and the customer's special instructions.
• Mark items or whole tickets done as they go up.
• Colour and position show you what's aging.

Read the special instructions. They're the customer's own words: "no onions", "very spicy", "allergy — no peanuts". Everything else on the ticket Orderly generated; that line a human typed because it mattered to them.

Ask Orderly AI (from the kitchen)

• "What's in the queue?"
• "Mark order 10110 ready"
• "We've run out of chicken"
• "Log 2 burgers wasted — dropped"

8.3 The Order Display (ODS) — the customer-facing screen

Where: Displays → Screens, tab Customer Display

This is the board on the wall customers watch while they wait. Two columns:

• Preparing — orders being cooked.
• Please Collect — orders ready at the counter.

Plus a live clock, a LIVE indicator, and a scrolling line at the bottom ("Please listen for your number").

Put this on any screen with a browser. It answers "is mine nearly ready?" without anyone having to ask, which frees your counter staff to actually serve.

8.4 The Order Kiosk (KSK)

Where: Displays → Order Kiosk

A self-service ordering screen: a tablet on a stand where customers browse the menu, build an order and pay, without talking to anyone.

From Order Kiosk you create a kiosk, configure it, and get the link to open on the device. You can run more than one.

Kiosk orders arrive as online orders, usually labelled Counter order because there's no signed-in customer behind them. They still need accepting.

Worth knowing: kiosks tend to produce larger orders than counter staff, because the machine always offers the add-ons and never feels rushed. If you have queues at lunch, a kiosk is often the cheapest fix available.

8.5 Printed tickets

Where: sidebar → Printers

Not every kitchen wants a screen. Orderly prints too — to a receipt printer at the pass, at the bar, or per station.

• All printers — your printers, what each one prints (kitchen tickets, receipts, bills), and which station it belongs to.
• Printer logs — every print job and whether it worked. When someone says "the ticket never came", this is where you find out whether Orderly sent it.

Screens and paper aren't exclusive — plenty of kitchens run a KDS for the line and a printer at the pass.

8.6 Choosing a setup

8.7 Kitchen problems, and what they usually are

"The screen is blank / stuck." Check Displays → Screens: does that display say Online? If it says Offline, it's the tablet's internet, not Orderly. Reload the page.

"Tickets aren't reaching us." Either the order wasn't accepted yet, or it was never sent to the kitchen, or the item is assigned to a different station. Check Kitchen Operations → Tickets and see whether the KOT exists at all.

"We're getting other sections' tickets." Your items are on the wrong station. Kitchen Operations → Stations.

"The printer stopped." Printers → Printer logs will tell you whether Orderly sent the job. If it did, the problem is the printer, the paper or the network.

Delivery and riders

Everything about getting food to someone who isn't in your restaurant: the riders, where you deliver, how jobs are handed out, and how the cash gets back to you.

Where: sidebar → Delivery

9.1 Settings — auto dispatch

Where: Delivery → Settings

One switch that changes how your whole delivery operation runs:

• Auto Dispatch on — when an order is ready, Orderly picks a rider and assigns it. Fast, and nobody has to remember.
• Auto Dispatch off — you assign every delivery yourself.

If you see "No delivery provider available", Orderly is telling you it has nobody to dispatch to. Either add your own riders (9.2), or connect an outside delivery company under Integrations → Delivery Providers.

Start with auto dispatch off for the first week so you can see how jobs get allocated, then turn it on.

9.2 Your riders

Where: Delivery → Driver list

Every rider you employ. Add one, and each gets their own record with:

Supporting screens:

• Car registration — your vehicles, if you own them.
• Groups — bundle riders into teams (morning crew, motorbikes, town centre).
• Zones — the geographic areas you deliver to (9.3).
• Employee Schedule and Shifts Schedule — who's working when.
• Reviews — customer ratings for riders.

9.3 Zones — where you deliver

Where: Delivery → Zones

A zone is an area on a map with rules attached: whether you deliver there, the fee, the minimum order, and roughly how long it takes.

Zones are what stop you accepting an order you can't profitably fulfil. If someone orders from outside every zone, Orderly tells them you don't deliver there — before they pay, instead of after.

Set fees honestly. A delivery fee that doesn't cover the ride is a discount you didn't mean to give, repeated every day.

9.4 The rider's app

Riders use delivery.orderly.co.ke on their phone. They sign in with the login you created for them.

What a rider does:

1. Go online at the start of their shift.
2. Get a job — an offer with the restaurant, the drop-off and the fee.
3. Accept, and navigate to you.
4. Collect the order and mark it picked up.
5. Deliver, mark it delivered, and collect cash if it's a cash order.
6. See their earnings as they go.

The customer can follow the rider on a live map, and can message them in the app — which removes most "where is my food" phone calls.

Ask Orderly AI (as a rider)

• "What deliveries do I have?"
• "How much have I earned today?"

9.5 Cash — the part that goes wrong

If you take cash on delivery, your riders end the day holding your money. Two screens manage that:

• Collect cash — record cash a rider hands back to you. Do this at the end of every shift, every day, without exception.
• Cashout list — payouts to riders: their fees, their tips, minus cash they're holding.

Each rider has a wallet balance that goes up as they earn and down as you pay them out, and moves the other way for cash they're holding on your behalf.

The one rule: reconcile cash daily. A rider's balance that's been drifting for three weeks cannot be untangled from memory, and it always ends in an argument that nobody enjoys.

9.6 Delivering without your own riders

Where: sidebar → Integrations → Delivery Providers

You can connect an outside delivery company instead of, or as well as, your own riders. Orderly hands them the job and tracks it the same way.

Sensible pattern: your own riders for the streets near you, a provider for the long ones.

9.7 The delivery order, end to end

 Order placed (delivery)
        │
   You accept it
        │
   Kitchen cooks it ──────► marked Ready
        │
   ┌────┴─────┐
   │          │
 auto      you assign
 dispatch   a rider
   │          │
   └────┬─────┘
        │
  Rider accepts, collects
        │
  Status: Delivery on its way
  (customer sees the rider on a map)
        │
  Rider delivers, collects cash if unpaid
        │
  Status: Delivered → Complete
        │
  End of shift: rider hands cash in
  (Delivery → Collect cash)

9.8 Common delivery problems

"The rider says the address is wrong." Open the order — the customer's address and phone are on it. Call them. Set the order to Delayed while you sort it out so the tracker doesn't go silent.

"Nobody is picking up deliveries." Check riders are online in the app, that they're on shift in the schedule, and whether auto dispatch is on.

"The customer says they already paid but the rider asked for money." Check Payment status on the order. If it says Paid, the rider shouldn't have asked. This is exactly why the rule in chapter 6 is to read payment status before food leaves.

"Delivery failed." Mark it Delivery failed rather than cancelling — the food was made and the ride happened, and your reports need to know the difference.

Customers

Where: sidebar → Customers

Every person who has ordered from you, what they ordered, what they said about it, and how to reach them.

10.1 The customer list

Where: Customers → Customer list

Each customer record holds:

• Who they are — name, phone, email, when they joined.
• Addresses — saved delivery addresses.
• Order History — everything they've ever ordered from you.
• Points — their loyalty balance.

Search by name, phone or email. Export the list.

When to actually use this:

• A customer phones about an order and can't remember the number — find them by phone, open their history.
• Before a big delivery, check whether the address has worked before.
• To see whether the person complaining is a first-timer or your best customer.

The dashboard's Top Customers panel is the shortcut: your most frequent customers, with how many orders each has placed. Those are the people whose names your staff should know.

Ask Orderly AI

• "Who are my top customers?"
• "What has Fatima Hassan ordered before?"

10.2 Reviews

Where: Customers → Review List

Ratings and comments customers left. The dashboard shows the star breakdown; this screen shows the actual words.

Read every one-star review the day it lands. Most of them are one of four things: it was late, it was cold, it was wrong, or nobody answered. All four are fixable, and all four are visible in Orderly if you look.

10.3 Email subscribers

Where: Customers → Email Subscribers

People who signed up for your mailing list on the storefront. Export it and use it — see chapter 11.

10.4 Chatting with customers

Where: sidebar → Communication → Chats, or the speech-bubble icon in the top bar

Live chat with customers, and with riders about specific deliveries. Faster than a phone call and it leaves a record attached to the order.

10.5 Loyalty points

Where: Marketing → Loyalty Points

One switch — Activate Loyalty Points System — turns the whole scheme on. Once it's on:

• Customers earn points on qualifying orders. They see it before they order: "Buy this item to earn 92 Points."
• Points show on the order page: "This order will earn 100 points."
• Customers redeem points against future orders once they cross a threshold.

Redeem thresholds and Monthly thresholds are configured at the platform level (chapter 16); as a restaurant you switch the scheme on and it applies.

Making it work rather than just exist:

• Say the points out loud at the till. "That's 92 points on your account."
• The value has to be visible enough to change behaviour. Points nobody can ever spend are worse than no points at all.
• Attach walk-in regulars to their customer record on the POS, or they earn nothing and quietly conclude your scheme is fake.

Marketing

The tools for getting people to order more often and spend more when they do.

Where: sidebar → Marketing

11.1 Coupons

Where: Marketing → Coupon

Discount codes. A coupon has a code, a discount (fixed amount or percentage), and limits: a date range, a minimum order, a maximum number of uses, and often which customers or items it applies to.

Codes that work:

• A welcome code for first orders — the cheapest way to convert a browser.
• A win-back code for customers who haven't ordered in 60 days.
• A slow-day code — Tuesday lunch, when your kitchen is idle anyway.

Codes that quietly cost you money:

• Permanent codes with no end date, that regulars use forever on orders they'd have placed anyway.
• Percentage discounts with no minimum order.
• Anything you can't remember creating. Review this list monthly and kill what's dead.

11.2 Offers

Where: Marketing → Offers

Promotions attached to the menu rather than to a code — the customer doesn't type anything, they just see a better price. Good for time-limited deals and for moving a dish that isn't selling.

11.3 Suggested items and spend-based free items

• Suggested Items — what Orderly offers alongside an order ("add a drink?"). Set these to genuine companions, not to your most expensive dish; the suggestion has to feel helpful or people stop reading it.
• Spend-Based Free Item — spend over X, get Y free. A clean way to lift average order value: it gives people a reason to add one more thing rather than to expect a discount.

11.4 Broadcasts

Where: Notifications → Broadcast, and Notifications → Settings

Send a message to your customers — SMS or push notification.

Settings is where you configure how messages go out and which events trigger automatic ones (order accepted, order ready, order on its way).

Rules for broadcasts, learned the expensive way:

1. Have something to say. "We're open" is not a message.
2. One a week is plenty. One a day loses you the list.
3. Send at a time people can act on — an hour before they'd eat, not at 3pm.
4. Make it specific: what's on offer, how long, and one clear action.

11.5 Images: gallery and media library

• Gallery — the pictures shown on your storefront.
• Media Library — every uploaded file, reusable across dishes, banners and pages.

Photography is not decoration on a food ordering site; it's the product page. Consistency matters more than perfection: one light source, one angle, one background, everything square.

11.6 Banners and pages

Where: Store Profile → Banner, Pages, Menu

• Banner — the big image at the top of your storefront.
• Pages — your own pages: About, Contact, Terms, Delivery Areas.
• Menu — the navigation links across the top of your storefront.

11.7 A marketing month that works

Reports and money

Two sections of the sidebar answer two different questions:

• Reports — how is the business doing?
• Finance — where is my money and when do I get it?

12.1 Reports

Where: sidebar → Reports

All of them take a date range and export to Excel, CSV or PDF.

Reading them without fooling yourself

Total sales is not profit. It includes VAT you owe, delivery fees that pay riders, and food that cost you money to buy. Watch the trend, not the number.

Average order value is the number to move. More orders means more work, more staff and more delivery. A higher average order is nearly free money. It moves through add-ons, sides, drinks and suggested items — see chapter 11.

Look at the Online / POS split. They're different businesses with different problems. Online falling usually means a website or menu issue; POS falling usually means footfall.

Watch refunds as a percentage. Rising refunds are a symptom — of lateness, of items you can't actually make, or of a menu photo that promises more than the plate delivers.

The dish nobody orders is costing you. It takes a slot on the menu, stock in the fridge and attention at the pass. Cut it or fix it.

Ask Orderly AI

• "How were sales today?"
• "What are my best selling items this month?"
• "How does this week compare to last week?"
• "What's my busiest time of day?"
• "Break down payments by method for last month"

12.2 Finance

Where: sidebar → Finance

How money reaches you

• Cash and card at the till — you already have it. It's recorded so your totals are right.
• Online payments — collected by the payment gateway and settled to you, minus any platform commission. This is what Statement tracks.
• Withdrawals — how you move an online balance into your bank.
• Bank Deposit — for paying money in, e.g. settling a subscription invoice by bank transfer and uploading the proof.

The monthly finance habit

1. Open Statement. Check the closing balance is what you expect.
2. Open Invoice List. Pay anything outstanding.
3. Request a withdrawal if you're holding a balance.
4. Cross-check Reports → Sales against your own cash records. They will differ — cash sits in a drawer, online money sits with the gateway — but you should be able to explain the difference in one sentence. If you can't, something needs looking at.

12.3 Tax

VAT is configured for your restaurant and applied automatically. In this install it's 16%, inclusive — the tax is already inside the prices customers see, and each order shows how much of the total was tax:

   Sub total (2 items)   Ksh 1,000.00
   Service fee              Ksh 20.00
   Total VAT (16%)         Ksh 137.93
   ─────────────────────────────────
   Total                 Ksh 1,020.00

The VAT line is a breakdown of what's already in the total, not an addition to it. Every order stores its own tax figure, so historical orders stay correct even if you change the rate later.

Tax settings live under Store Profile → Settings → Taxes. Get them right once, with your accountant, and then leave them alone.

Settings

Everything that decides how your restaurant behaves. You'll set most of it once and never touch it again — which is exactly why it's worth getting right.

13.1 Store Profile → Merchant Information

Where: Store Profile → Merchant Information

Your public identity: restaurant name, logo, cover photo, description, cuisine types, address, phone, email, social links.

This is what customers see on the storefront and in search results. Treat it like a shopfront: a blurry logo and a blank description cost you orders from people who never tell you why.

13.2 Store Profile → Settings

Where: Store Profile → Settings

The big one. A left-hand list of sections, each with its own form.

Basic Settings

And the toggles:

• Close Store — the emergency stop. Turns off ordering immediately, without touching your opening hours. Use it when the power is out or the kitchen is under water. Remember to turn it back off.
• Enabled Voucher — accept coupon codes at checkout.
• Enabled Tips — let customers tip.
• Enabled WhatsApp Ordering — a WhatsApp route to order.
• Enabled Age Verification Popup — for alcohol.
• Enabled language (Single app only) — language switching in your branded app.

Checkout Time Selection — whether customers may order ASAP only, for a specific time only, or Both. Both is usually right.

Default Tip / Tip Type (fixed or percentage) / which transactions can be tipped.

The other sections

13.3 Order limit

Where: Store Profile → Order limit

Caps on how many orders you'll take in a period. Together with Kitchen Workload, this is how you stop a promotion turning into a two-hour ticket backlog and a night of bad reviews.

13.4 Order Types & Payments

Where: sidebar → Order Types & Payments

Order types

Payments

All Payments lists every payment method available to you, each switched on or off. Typically: cash, card, M-Pesa, bank deposit, wallet, pay-on-delivery.

Each method has its own credentials to fill in — a merchant key, a paybill number, an API secret. Enter them carefully; a typo means payments silently fail at the last step of checkout, which is the most expensive place to fail.

• Bank Deposit — accept payment by bank transfer with proof uploaded.
• Pay on delivery — cash or card on the doorstep.

Before you go live: place one real order through each payment method you've switched on, for a small amount, and check it lands. Ten minutes of testing beats a week of "customers say they paid but nothing arrived."

13.5 Menu Attributes

Where: sidebar → Menu Attributes — Size, Ingredients, Cooking Reference. Covered in chapter 3.

13.6 Users and roles

Where: sidebar → Users & Roles

• All Users — every staff login for your restaurant.
• All Roles — the permission sets you can assign.

How to think about it: a role is a job description ("Cashier"). A user is a person. You create the roles once and then hand them out.

A sensible starting set:

Rules:

1. One login per person. Always.
2. Give the least access that lets someone do their job. It's not distrust — it's so that when something goes wrong you can see what happened.
3. Remove logins the day someone leaves.
4. Discounts and voids should require a role most staff don't have.

Roles also govern Orderly AI: the assistant can only do what your role can do. A cashier asking it to change a price gets the same refusal they'd get from the menu screen. See chapter 14.

13.7 Printers

Where: sidebar → Printers

• All printers — each printer, what it prints, which station it serves.
• Printer logs — every job and whether it succeeded. Start here whenever someone says a ticket didn't come out.

13.8 Integrations

Where: sidebar → Integrations → Delivery Providers

Connect outside delivery companies. See chapter 9.

13.9 The settings you'll actually change often

Everything above is set-once. These four are not:

1. Close Store — when something goes wrong.
2. Store Hours — holidays, special events.
3. Kitchen Workload / Order limit — when you're slammed.
4. Item availability — every single day. (Chapter 3.)

Orderly AI

Orderly has an assistant built into it. Not a help chatbot that reads a manual at you — an assistant that can see your live orders, your menu, your tables and your sales, and that can change things when you ask it to.

This chapter is the whole of it: where it is, what to say, what it can do for each job, what it refuses, and how to control it.

14.1 What it actually is

Ask it "How were sales today?" and it doesn't guess, and it doesn't search the web. It looks up your real figures and tells you:

Today's sales: 3 orders, total KES 2,440.00. Average order value KES 813.3

Three things make that possible, and they're worth understanding because they explain everything else in this chapter:

1. It has tools. Roughly three dozen specific abilities — list orders, get sales summary, list tables, mark sold out — each one a real query against your restaurant's data.
2. It knows who you are. It reads your identity from your login, never from what you type. You cannot talk it into showing you another restaurant's numbers, because it never asks which restaurant — it already knows.
3. It can only do what you can do. Your role decides which tools it holds. A cashier's assistant simply does not have the "change prices" tool in its hands.

14.2 Where to find it

Click either and a panel slides in:

You get:

• A greeting by name — "Hi Richard — ask me about your orders, menu, tables or sales."
• Starter chips you can tap instead of typing: How were sales today? / What tables are free for 2? / We're out of chicken — take it off the menu
• A text box: "Ask about orders, menu, tables…"
• A microphone, so you can talk to it instead of typing. Useful mid-service with full hands.
• A history icon (top right) for earlier conversations, and × to close.

It stays open while you work, and it follows you from page to page.

14.3 How to talk to it

Talk to it like a colleague, not a computer. All of these work:

• "how we doing today"
• "How much did we make yesterday?"
• "what's still cooking"
• "86 the shawarma"
• "seat 2 at table 4"
• "we binned two crispy chicken, dropped them"
• "who's my best customer"

Things worth knowing:

• It understands restaurant slang. "86 it" means take it off the menu, and the assistant knows that.
• It knows Kenyan context — shillings, M-Pesa, and everyday Sheng.
• It answers first. No preamble, no "Certainly!", no restating your question. A short question gets a short answer.
• It doesn't make numbers up. Every figure it gives you came from a lookup it just performed. If it can't find something, it says so rather than inventing it.
• You can be vague about names. "the chicken" is fine. If more than one dish matches, it lists the candidates and asks which you meant, rather than guessing.
• It remembers the conversation. You can say "and yesterday?" after asking about today.

14.4 What it can do, by job

Everyone gets a different assistant, because everyone has a different job. Here is the complete list of what each one can do, and exactly what to say.

14.4.1 If you own or manage the restaurant

Sales and performance

Orders

Menu

Floor and tables

Customers and staff

Taking an order

That one is worth being precise about: it creates a draft for someone to take payment on. It does not charge anybody and does not send anything to the kitchen. A human still finishes it on the POS.

Reporting a problem

✱ = a change. Always asks you to confirm first — see 14.5.

14.4.2 If you work in the kitchen

The kitchen assistant is deliberately narrow. It can move a ticket through the kitchen and nothing else — it cannot complete, deliver, cancel or refund an order. That's not an oversight; the kitchen shouldn't be able to close an order that hasn't been paid for.

14.4.3 If you're a rider

Read-only. A rider's assistant cannot change anything.

14.4.4 If you're a customer ordering food

Your customers get an assistant too, on the storefront:

It cannot place the order or take payment — they still check out on screen themselves. And on a browse-everything page, before they've picked a restaurant, it can help them find one: "who delivers nyama choma", "somewhere cheap around Kilimani".

14.4.5 If you run the platform

See chapter 16.

14.5 Anything that changes something asks first

This is the safety rule that governs the whole assistant, and it's worth understanding rather than just noticing.

Reading is free. Ask for sales, orders, tables, customers — it just answers.

Changing needs your say-so. Ask it to take a dish off the menu and it does not do it. It stops and shows you a card:

This change needs your confirmation. Mark sold out Cancel Confirm

Nothing happens until you press Confirm. Cancel and it's dropped.

Details worth knowing:

• Each confirmation is single-use. It can't be replayed later.
• Every change is written to an audit log — what was asked, what was done, by whom, from where, and when.
• Confirmation applies to every change, however small.
• Your operator can turn writes off entirely (see 14.7), which makes the assistant strictly read-only no matter what tools exist.

14.6 What it will not do

Knowing the edges saves you from arguing with it.

It won't act outside your permissions. If your role can't see reports, the assistant can't either. Same rules, one door.

It won't cross restaurants. It cannot be pointed at another merchant's data. Your identity comes from your session; there is no "which restaurant" parameter for anyone to tamper with.

It won't touch money directly. No refunds, no payment adjustments, no changing what someone was charged. Those go through the proper screens, where they are logged as financial actions.

It won't run free-form database queries. It has a fixed set of tools. There is no way to make it "just run this SQL".

It won't reveal system internals. Credentials, keys, file paths and server details are filtered out of replies before you see them.

It won't invent numbers. If it doesn't have a figure it says so. An answer with a number in it means a real lookup happened.

The customer-facing assistant can't write at all. By design: it's reachable without logging in, so it is read-only, enforced at start-up.

14.7 Controlling it (owners and operators)

Orderly AI is configurable rather than take-it-as-it-comes:

Turning it on or off for a given restaurant, and the monthly message allowance, are set by the platform — see chapter 16.

14.8 Limits

• Message allowance. Each plan includes a monthly number of assistant messages. Restaurants without a plan get a small trial allowance.
• Rate limit. A cap per minute, so one person hammering it can't starve everyone else.
• Length. Replies have a ceiling. Ask for "every order this year" and you'll get a summary, not ten thousand rows.

If you hit a limit it tells you plainly rather than failing silently.

14.9 Getting good answers

Be specific about time. "Sales" gets today. "Sales for last month", "last 7 days", "this week" get what you meant.

Ask one thing at a time. Three questions in one message gets you a worse answer than three messages.

Use its words back. If it says an order is "ready for pickup", use that phrase to filter.

Follow up rather than restarting. "And yesterday?" is better than retyping the whole question.

Let it look things up. Don't feed it an item id — say "the roasted chicken" and let it find it.

Complain to it. If something in Orderly is confusing or missing, tell the assistant. It answers you and files it with the Orderly team. That's a supported route, not a joke.

14.10 When the assistant misbehaves

"The assistant is unavailable right now." Something went wrong reaching the AI service, or your restaurant's allowance is used up. Wait a moment and ask again. If it persists, tell your platform administrator — they can see the state of the connection and the allowance from the AI console.

It gave a short answer to a complex question. By design, replies are capped. Narrow the question: one day, one dish, one customer.

It says it can't do something you can do on screen. Two possible reasons: your role doesn't grant that action, or the operator has disabled that specific tool. Both are deliberate. Use the screen.

It asked me to confirm and I clicked Confirm but nothing changed. Confirmations are single-use and expire. Ask again and confirm the fresh card.

I don't want staff using it. It can be turned off per restaurant, or restricted to read-only, or have individual abilities disabled. See 14.7.

14.11 The five things worth remembering

1. It sees your real data. Its answers are your figures, not a guess.
2. It only does what your role allows. It's the same permissions, a different door.
3. Every change asks first, and every change is logged.
4. Talk to it normally. Slang, shorthand and half-sentences are fine.
5. It's fastest for exactly the things that interrupt you mid-service — "86 the chicken", "what tables are free", "how are we doing" — because you never have to leave the screen you're on.

What your customers see

You can't fix what you've never looked at. This chapter walks the customer's side of Orderly, so you know exactly what happens between "I'm hungry" and "here's my food."

Look at it yourself. The View Website button in the top bar opens your storefront as a customer sees it. Do that after every menu change.

15.1 Finding you

The Orderly home page is a marketplace: a search box ("Search pizza, shawarma, nyama choma…"), cuisine tiles, a delivery location, and lists of Popular Restaurants Near You, New Restaurants and Best Seller Restaurants.

Each restaurant card shows the name, cuisines, star rating and delivery time.

What decides whether you appear well here:

• Your cuisine tags — they drive the category filters.
• Your rating.
• Your delivery time estimate.
• Your photo. It's the whole card.

There's also an assistant on the storefront, so a customer can just ask: "who delivers nyama choma", "somewhere cheap around Kilimani".

15.2 Your restaurant page

Clicking through lands on your page — for The Whitney, web.orderly.co.ke/whitney.

They get:

• Your banner, logo, name, rating and delivery time.
• Buttons for Delivery / Pickup / Dine-in, whichever you offer.
• An address bar to check you deliver to them.
• Your menu, by category, down the left.
• A Cart panel on the right that follows them as they scroll.
• Your opening hours, location map, and reviews further down.

15.3 Ordering a dish

Tapping a dish opens it, with everything you set up in chapter 3:

• Photo, name and description.
• Points they'll earn — "Buy this item to earn 92 Points."
• Sizes as buttons: Full 920, ¾ 690, ½ 460, ¼ 230.
• Special Instructions — a free-text box that lands on your kitchen ticket.
• If sold out — what they want you to do if you can't make it. The default is "Go with merchant recommendation."
• Quantity, and Add to cart with the running price.

15.4 The basket

The cart panel shows each item with its size, quantity controls, a remove button, the running total, and a Checkout button carrying the amount.

15.5 Checkout

At checkout the customer signs in or creates an account (they can't check out anonymously in this configuration), then:

1. Confirms Delivery, Pickup or Dine-in.
2. Gives an address for delivery — checked against your zones. If they're outside, they're told now, not after paying.
3. Chooses ASAP or a scheduled time, if you allow both.
4. Adds a coupon code, if you use them.
5. Adds a tip, if you've enabled tips.
6. Picks a payment method — M-Pesa, card, cash on delivery, wallet.
7. Places the order.

Then it lands in your Live Orders, and they start waiting.

15.6 Tracking

After ordering, the customer gets a tracking screen. It shows the order's status as it changes, and for deliveries, the rider on a live map. They can message the rider.

This is the screen that makes or breaks the experience, and it's driven entirely by the statuses you set. A customer looking at "Preparing" for forty minutes with no change believes you have forgotten them — because from where they're sitting, that's exactly what it looks like. See chapter 4.

15.7 Their account

Signed-in customers get: order history and reorder, saved addresses, loyalty points, reviews they've left, and their profile.

Reorder is worth knowing about. A regular's second order should take four taps. It's the single biggest reason a customer account is worth having.

15.8 The apps

These are installable web apps: the customer opens the link, chooses "Add to Home Screen", and gets an icon like any other app — no app store, no download, no update to chase.

A branded app is worth having if you have real repeat customers. It removes the marketplace, which means it removes the competitors sitting next to you on it.

15.9 The customer's assistant

Your storefront can carry the assistant too, so a customer can ask "what do you have with chicken?", "anything under 300?", "do you do vegetarian?" and have dishes added to their basket by asking.

It can't place the order or take payment — they always check out themselves. See chapter 14.

15.10 Ten minutes that will change your storefront

Once a month, open your own site on a phone and order something. Actually pay. Then ask:

1. Is the first photo good enough to make someone hungry?
2. Can I find the thing I want in under ten seconds?
3. Do the descriptions tell me what I'm getting?
4. Is anything showing as available that we haven't had all week?
5. Does checkout ask for anything we don't need?
6. Did the tracking screen actually update?
7. How long did the whole thing take?

Every one of those is fixable from the backoffice, and every one of them costs you orders while it's broken.

Platform administration

This chapter is for the Orderly team, not for restaurants. It covers the platform-level backoffice: every merchant, the plans they're on, the money that flows through, and the settings that apply to everyone.

Where: web.orderly.co.ke/backoffice/login — the Administrator Login (different from the Merchant Login restaurants use).

Screenshots in this chapter are not included, because this handbook was produced from a merchant account. Everything described is taken from the live platform configuration.

16.1 The admin sidebar

16.2 Merchants

Merchants → List is every restaurant on the platform, with its status:

New signup is the approval queue. A restaurant sits here until you approve it, so nothing goes live unvetted.

Sponsored controls paid placement on the marketplace.

Opening a merchant gives you their full configuration — the same screens the restaurant sees, from your side.

16.3 Plans and billing

Where: Membership → Plan List, Subscriber List

Orderly sells to restaurants on a monthly subscription. The live plans:

Billing runs through the payment gateway at signup and on renewal. Restaurants can also pay by bank transfer — Subscriptions Bank Deposit is where those proofs land for approval.

Subscriber List shows who is on what, and when they renew.

16.4 Orderly AI at platform level

Where: sidebar → Orderly AI

The console that runs the assistant for the whole platform.

The readiness checklist

The console opens with a checklist that has to be green before the assistant works:

• Database schema is at the required version.
• The encryption secret is configured.
• There's an active API key.
• The assistant is enabled globally.
• At least one merchant has it enabled.
• Documentation chunks are indexed (for "how do I…" answers).

Keys and budget

You add provider API keys here. Keys are encrypted at rest and only ever shown as a last-four hint. Each key can carry:

• A scope — which merchants it serves.
• A monthly budget, with automatic rollover per period.
• Automatic disabling on authentication failure, so a revoked key stops being retried.

Test key sends a small request and reports back, so you can prove a key works before relying on it.

Per-merchant control

Each merchant can be toggled on or off independently of their plan. The resolution order is: an explicit per-merchant setting wins; otherwise the plan decides; a merchant with no plan gets a small trial allowance.

Settings

Provider and model, max output tokens, house style, guard rails, redaction terms, documentation usage, disabled tools, and the master Allow changes switch. See chapter 14.

The platform assistant's own tools

Signed in as an admin, the assistant answers platform questions:

That payment health check is worth calling out: a gateway that is switched on but missing a credential looks fine on every list and fails only at the final step of a customer's checkout. This is the check that catches it.

Monitoring watchers

Orderly runs background watchers that raise findings without anyone asking:

Findings are ranked by severity and readable through the assistant or the console.

Learning notes

The assistant can propose durable notes about how the platform behaves — patterns it has noticed that would help future conversations. They are suggestions only and do nothing until an operator approves them. Approved notes then inform every future conversation.

The audit trail

Every tool call is logged: what was asked, what was returned, who asked, from what address, how long it took, whether it was a change, and who confirmed it.

16.5 Attributes — the platform's vocabulary

Where: sidebar → Attributes

This is where the words the whole platform uses are defined. Most of it is set once at launch:

Cuisines · Dishes · Allergens · Tags · Order Status · Currency · Locations · Zones · Featured Locations · Pages · Languages · Status Management · Order Types · Merchant Types · Rejection reasons · Pause-order reasons · Status Actions · Tips · Booking cancellation reasons · Cookie preferences · Vehicle makers · Delivery order help · Delivery decline reasons · Call-staff menu · KOT cancellation reasons.

Two worth knowing about:

• Status Management controls the colours of status badges platform-wide. Those colours come from the database, not from a stylesheet — if a badge is the wrong colour, this is where it's fixed.
• Rejection / decline / cancellation reason lists are what make your reports useful. Restaurants pick from these lists, so keeping them short and meaningful turns "why are we cancelling things?" into an answerable question.

16.6 Payments at platform level

• All Payment — every gateway, its credentials, and whether it's on.
• Account Transactions — money moving through the platform.
• Merchant Earnings / Merchant withdrawals — what restaurants are owed and what they've asked for.
• Withdrawals Settings — minimums, frequency, approval rules.
• Invoices and Invoice Settings — subscription billing.
• Bank Deposit — offline payments awaiting approval.

16.7 Modules

Where: sidebar → Modules

Platform capabilities you switch on and configure:

Table reservations · Multi-currency and exchange rates · Communication and chat · Real-time application (live updates) · Mobile Merchant API access · Tableside Ordering API access · Kitchen App settings · SMS providers and logs · Digital wallet and bonus funds · Firebase (push notifications) · WhatsApp · Telegram.

Addon manager installs new modules — payment gateways and feature packs — without touching the core.

16.8 Utilities

Where: sidebar → Utilities

• Clear Cache — the first thing to try when a change isn't showing up.
• Cron Jobs — the scheduled tasks that drive order processing, status updates and notifications. If orders stop moving on their own, look here first.
• Fixed database / Clean database / Migration Tools — maintenance. Take a backup before running any of them.

16.9 A platform operator's routine

Daily

• Ask the assistant "what's wrong?" — read the open findings.
• Clear the New signup queue.
• Check payment gateway health.

Weekly

• Merchant Sales report: who's growing, who's gone quiet.
• Ask "what are merchants complaining about?"
• Process withdrawal requests.

Monthly

• Membership payments and renewals.
• Review the AI budget and message usage.
• Review learning notes awaiting approval.

When something goes wrong

Sorted by what you'd say out loud, not by which part of the system it is.

Signing in

"It says incorrect username or password but I know it's right." You're probably on the wrong login page. Restaurants use /backoffice/auth/login — the page headed Merchant Login. /backoffice/login is Administrator Login, for the Orderly team, and the same password will be rejected there. Check the heading first.

"I've forgotten my password." Forgot password? on the login page sends a reset to the email on the account. If nobody knows the email either, your manager or Orderly can reset it.

"It logs me out during service." Tick Remember me — but only on a device only your team uses. On a shared tablet, don't.

Orders

"An order came in but no sound played." Allow notifications for the site on that device, turn the volume up, and keep the Orders tab open. A locked or sleeping tablet cannot make a noise.

"A customer says they paid but the order shows unpaid." Open the order and read Payment history — every attempt is there with its reference. Online payments confirm within seconds; if one is genuinely stuck it usually reconciles on its own shortly after. Don't mark it paid by hand. If it's still wrong after that, contact support with the order number and the reference.

"I accepted an order I can't actually make." Contact the customer, then either set the order to Delayed while you sort it or cancel it with a reason. Don't leave it silent.

"The order is in the wrong status and I can't move it back." Statuses move forward by design. If something needs reversing, cancel and recreate, or ask a manager — reversals are restricted deliberately.

"An order disappeared." It didn't. It's finished, so it moved from Live Orders to Order History. Search there by number or customer.

"Two identical orders arrived." Check the Origin column. If one is WEB and one is POS, somebody re-typed an online order into the till — see chapter 6. Cancel the duplicate.

The POS

"I hit Reset Order by mistake." It's gone. Rebuild it. This is why you read the total back to the customer before finishing, not after.

"The customer wants to split the bill." Record more than one payment against the order on the payment screen.

"There's an order in Open Orders and nobody knows whose it is." Open it — the items, the table and the time will tell you. If the table is empty and the food went out, take payment or void it with a manager. Clear this list every night.

"I sent the KOT and then the customer changed their mind." The kitchen already has it. Tell them verbally first, then fix the order.

"I can't apply a discount." Your role probably doesn't allow it. That's deliberate. Get a manager.

The menu

"I changed a price and the website still shows the old one." Hard-refresh the storefront (Ctrl+Shift+R, or pull to refresh on a phone). If it persists, an administrator can clear the platform cache.

"A dish I marked unavailable is still being ordered." Check you toggled the right one — with several similar names it's easy to hit the wrong row. Menu → Items Availability shows everything on one screen.

"A dish doesn't appear on the storefront at all." Check three things in order: is it Published? Is its category published? Is its availability schedule limiting it to hours you're not currently in?

"Prices are wrong for one size only." Sizes carry their own prices. Open the dish, go to the Price tab, and fix that size.

Kitchen

"The kitchen screen is blank or frozen." Displays → Screens: does that display say Online? If it says Offline, it's the tablet's connection. Reload the page on the device.

"Tickets aren't reaching the kitchen." Was the order accepted? Was it sent to the kitchen? Is the item assigned to a different station? Kitchen Operations → Tickets (KOT) will show whether a ticket exists at all.

"We're seeing other sections' tickets." Items are on the wrong station. Kitchen Operations → Stations.

"The printer isn't printing." Printers → Printer logs tells you whether Orderly sent the job. If it did, the problem is the printer, the paper, or the network — not Orderly.

Delivery

"No rider is picking up the job." Are riders online in the app? Are they on shift in the schedule? Is auto dispatch on? Delivery → Settings.

"The rider asked a customer for money on an order they'd already paid for." Read Payment status before food leaves. If it says Paid, no money is due. Worth making this a standing rule with your riders.

"A rider's cash balance doesn't add up." Reconcile daily with Delivery → Collect cash. A balance that's drifted for weeks can't be reconstructed.

Orderly AI

"The assistant is unavailable right now." Either a temporary problem reaching the AI service, or your restaurant's monthly allowance is used up. Try again shortly; if it persists, your platform administrator can check the connection and the allowance.

"It won't do something I can do on screen." Either your role doesn't grant that action, or the operator has disabled that specific ability. Both are deliberate — use the screen.

"It asked me to confirm, I pressed Confirm, nothing happened." Confirmations are single-use and expire. Ask again and confirm the fresh card.

"I don't want my staff using it." It can be turned off per restaurant, made read-only, or have individual abilities disabled. See chapter 14.

Money and reports

"The dashboard doesn't match my cash drawer." It shouldn't. The dashboard is Online + POS; the drawer is only the cash part of POS. Look at the POS figure for the till and the Online figure for money that went to your account.

"My statement balance isn't what I expected." Statement is your account with the platform: earnings minus commission, minus withdrawals. Compare it against Reports → Sales for the same period and the difference should be explainable in one sentence.

"VAT looks wrong." In this configuration VAT is inclusive — already inside the prices customers see. The VAT line on an order breaks out how much of the total was tax; it is not added on top. Store Profile → Settings → Taxes.

Escalating

When you contact support, bring:

1. The order number if it's about an order.
2. What you expected to happen.
3. What actually happened.
4. A screenshot.
5. The time it happened, and which device.

You can also just tell the assistant. Say "this is confusing" or "Orderly can't do X" and it answers you and files the report with the Orderly team at the same time.

Glossary

Every word Orderly uses that isn't obvious.

86 / 86 it — Kitchen slang for "we're out of it, take it off." Orderly AI understands it: "86 the shawarma".

Add-on — An extra a customer picks with a dish (extra cheese, a side, a drink). Grouped into add-on categories.

Auto dispatch — Orderly automatically assigning delivery jobs to riders, instead of you doing it by hand.

Backoffice — The admin website where you run the restaurant. Not the customer's site.

Broadcast — A message sent to many customers at once, by SMS or push.

Cashout — Paying a rider what they're owed.

Category — A section of your menu (Breakfast, Main Dish, Drinks).

Commission — The platform's cut of an order.

Confirmation card — The Confirm / Cancel prompt Orderly AI shows before it changes anything.

Coupon — A discount code a customer types at checkout.

Dine-in — The customer eats in your restaurant.

Findings — Problems the platform's background monitoring has detected.

Floor plan — The live picture of your dining room and which tables are taken.

KDS — Kitchen Display Screen — The screen cooks work from.

Kiosk (KSK) — A self-service tablet in your shop where customers order themselves.

KOT — Kitchen Order Ticket — The kitchen's copy of an order.

Live Orders — Orders currently in progress.

Loyalty points — Points customers earn on orders and redeem later.

Main account — The owner's login. Sees everything for that restaurant.

Merchant — One restaurant. Three branches = three merchants.

M-Pesa — Mobile money. A payment method.

ODS — Order Display Screen — The board customers watch: Preparing / Please Collect.

Online order — An order the customer typed, on the website, app, kiosk or table QR. Needs accepting.

Open Orders — POS orders that are parked or unpaid. Money not yet collected.

Order type — Delivery, Pickup or Dine-in.

Origin — Where an order came from: WEB or POS.

Pickup — The customer collects from you.

POS — Point of Sale — The till. Also: an order your staff typed.

Plan — The subscription a restaurant is on: Orderly Core, Orderly AI, or Orderly AI Ultra.

Publish — Whether a dish exists on your menu at all. Different from Available, which is whether you can cook it right now.

Role — A permission set. A job description you assign to staff.

Scheduled order — Ordered now, wanted later.

Scope — Which set of abilities Orderly AI is using: merchant, kitchen, driver, customer, platform.

Special instructions — What the customer typed about their dish. Appears on the kitchen ticket. Read it.

Station — A section of your kitchen (grill, cold, bar) with its own tickets.

Statement — Your running financial account with the platform.

Storefront — Your public website, where customers order.

Tableside ordering — Customers scanning a QR code on their table to order from their own phone.

Tool — One specific thing Orderly AI can do. It has about three dozen.

VAT — Value Added Tax. 16% and inclusive in this configuration: already inside the prices customers see.

Wallet — A stored balance. Customers have one; so do riders and merchants.

Watcher — Background monitoring that raises findings without being asked.

Withdrawal — Moving your Orderly balance into your bank account.

Zone — A delivery area with its own fee, minimum order and time estimate.