About Hold & Fire

In food service environments, when placing orders for multi-course meals, it is common practice to Hold the later course(s) from being prepared in the kitchen. When customers are nearly ready to receive a later course, a Fire order can be sent to begin preparing the held course(s).

POS allows serving staff to ring up a number of items and place any number of them on hold. Notification is then sent to the kitchen (or other service area) to begin preparing only the items that are not held. The serving staff can later send a fire order to notify the kitchen that held items are now to be prepared.

For example: Starter dishes may be prepared as soon as the order is placed. Mains are held and then fired when customers are ready.

Notifications are sent to the Kitchen screen of the service area, as well as Prepare Slips being printed.

This function is normally used in conjunction with checks, as restaurant environments use checks to associate orders with tables.

Note: When items in a check are Held, the icon is displayed on the Checks page. This allows serving staff to easily see which checks have held items.

See also:

• Setting up Hold & Fire operations at POS
• Holding items from the kitchen at POS
• Firing held items in checks
• Firing held items from the Kitchen screen
• Improving meal delivery with automatic hold and fire
• Allowing POS operators to vary course delivery times