When will my Square Online order tickets print? When an order is placed, or at start of prep time?

[Binzy1437]

The title of this post has been edited from the original: Online order tickets - Print when placed vs. Print at prep time

Hi, there was a change to the auto printing function in the past few weeks.  Previously we were set up to auto print our online orders as they came in, which was great for us!  

Without notice, it appears that the auto print feature is now hard set to print at prep time, this does not work for us!

Can you please add an option for sellers to choose whether they want online orders to auto print when orders are placed or at prep time?

Thank you!

[scappoosebagel]

I too would like the orders to print when placed!  Are they working on bringing this option back @BernadetteA or are we all SOL?

[BernadetteA]

Thanks for reaching out, @scappoosebagel

I can double check, but I do not believe there are any plans to change this. The only work around that I'm aware of is to navigate to the Upcoming tab for orders, and manually print the tickets. 

Is there a particular reason why you want all of the orders (regardless of due time) to be printed at once? The teams are always looking for feedback, and I'm happy to pass it along for you. 

[bakerandspice]

Hi Bernadette,

We are also a bakery and would like online order tickets to print as soon as the order is placed so that we can pull and set aside the items that have been ordered right away. We are very fast-paced and are simultaneously selling items in person at the bakery and online. Therefore, we need to pull online order items as soon as possible so as not to sell them to an in-person customer. 

We have tried utilizing inventory management through Square Online and the Dashboard, but there is a delay with that that doesn't keep us from over selling items. We would like to start trying to pull the orders together right away, but would need the incoming online order tickets to print as soon as the order is placed versus according to the prep time. 

This is our particular situation, but it sounds similar to others in this thread. Hopefully, that helps clarify why we want online order ticket printing options. 

Thanks!

[BernadetteA]

Thanks for your feedback, @bakerandspice We appreciate you taking the time to share your shop experience! 😊

The inventory should automatically update once an online order is placed. Are you saying that inventory is not reflecting the online orders when you are making in-person sales? 

For printing, please make sure that the option is turned on here: 

Settings  >  Hardware  >  Printers  >  Select Printer  >  in printer settings, turn on "Online Orders"  >  then toggle on "Automatically Print New Orders"

As far as I know, this setting will automatically print out orders without a prep time. If there is a prep time you would need to manually print the order from Orders > Upcoming

I'll have to check with the team to see if anything has changed with this, and will make sure to update this thread if I hear of any good news. 

[bakerandspice]

Thanks for getting back to me! 

The inventory does update with each sale, online or in-person. The problem we're running into is selling the last of something to someone in-person at the same time as someone ordering it online. I'm going to try to describe a specific scenario...

Say we have 25 scones for the whole day, and we've sold 20 online but haven't had a chance to pack up those orders. So those 25 scones are all on a tray in our retail area, and a customer comes in and wants to purchase 10 scones. Other than going into Items and looking up the scone inventory, there is no quick way to tell if 10 scones are actually available/the POS doesn't stop the retailer from selling 10 scones. It allows the sale, and only after making the sale does it notify us on the POS that we are sold out of scones. But by then, we have over sold scones and now don't have enough to fulfill the online orders. 

Does that make sense? The only way around this problem that we've found so far is to be super on top of packing up online orders and pulling sold items or to have a small supply of backup items that aren't included in the inventory. Hence the want for online orders to print right away. But even better would be a feature where the POS doesn't allow an in-person sale for more items than are available in the inventory. 

Sorry to dump this all here, but we have been trying to find the most effective way to deal with this since the start of the pandemic. And at this point, I appreciate any one listening and offering any advice or tips that they may have. Thank you!

[BernadetteA]

Thank you so much for clarifying further. This is definitely helpful, and I will forward it all to the teams. ❤️

[chefheathercued]

We have been selling through the Square iPad POS at our restaurant counter and the orders print, and everything has been working well.   We want to offer online ordering for customers out on the deck.   While testing the online orders we have noticed that they do not auto-print, and we absolutely need them to auto-print!   We can see the online orders, and we can print them manually.   We have tried various things our settings, and have not been able to resolve this.   I followed steps from another support thread on this topic but it did not work.    For example, another support thread instructed: 

To enable automatic printing for pickup orders:

1. Tap the three horizontal lines on the bottom navigation bar.
2. Tap Settings > Remote Orders.  - but we do not see this option under settings. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ryanwanner]

Hello @chefheathercued !

Chef, the settings changed a little bit from that support thread you found. In order to enable online printing, you need to configure your printer stations:

On your main POS, tap More -> Settings -> Hardware, then tap the printer you want online tickets to print to.

On the next screen, scroll down to the Printer Station section and tap Edit.

In here, there is a section for Online Order Tickets. Tap this, then enable "Use this printer for online order tickets."

Make sure "Automatically Print New Orders" is enabled, and then choose the categories you want to print.

That should get you up and running for online orders! If you have multiple tablets and/or your phone on the same network, you should do these steps on all those devices except don't select Auto Print--you may get duplicate tickets.

Hope this helps!

[cbstl]

@BernadetteA(or anyone else from Square)

I also work for a bakery and just got a kitchen printer to automatically print our online orders. Unfortunately, I incorrectly assumed it would print the orders as soon as they were placed, but instead it seems to print based on the "pickup time minus prep time" calculation previously mentioned in this thread. That doesn't work for us. As a custom order bakery, nearly all of our orders are pre-orders and very often they're placed many days or weeks in advance. Our prep times are based on the minimum prep time for a given item but we need to continually plan out the aggregate filling of all our pre-orders, so we need the orders to automatically print as soon as they're placed.

If there's still not an option to configure the kitchen printers this way, Square please add that option. It's obvious from this thread that many of your users (mainly bakeries I would imagine) have a business model that requires it.

[mitos]

I am pretty sure we were also previously able to opt (in our POS app) to have online orders print immediately when the order comes in rather than waiting until "prep time".  However, this is not longer working and no longer seems to be an option.  If an order is larger than average, or if it may be for early the next day, we need to know in advance that we have that order.  We are supposed to get a notification of that order on-screen, but if no one is there to see that notification at the right time, we don't know it's there in order to manually print the ticket. 

Any chance this option is available in Restaurants?  If so it would be impetus for us to switch, even though we are counter service so really don't need its added features.  

[BernadetteA · Accepted solution]

Hey everyone! 👋😊

I wanted to share some exciting news that you are now able to choose when you want to have your online orders print!

From the Square Online dashboard, click Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery then select Edit next to your store location. On the next page, click Pickup, then scroll down to the section that says When should pickup & delivery order tickets print?

You can use the default method which would print orders based on the pickup and delivery time: immediately, or based on prep time. The second option (which has been highly requested) is to print ALL tickets immediately, regardless of prep time.

I hope this helps you all out, and thank you all for voicing your feedback for this option!

[Keli]

THANK YOU tremendously! I just changed it and will see how it works on our busiest day tomorrow…FRIDAYS! 🙂 YEAH!

[ardensrowayton]

Hi there. We are a cafe using bentobox for online ordering and square as our POS with Star printers. We would like online orders to print based on the prep time (NOT automatically). We selected the first option "print order tickets based on prep time" however they are still printing automatically despite that setting being selected. Any advice on how we can troubleshoot this issue?

[Laurie_]

Hey there @ardensrowayton,

I'm sorry to hear this!

Can I confirm that you've updated the prep time for your items from the Pickup & Delivery settings from your online Square Dashboard?

If your prep time is set and you have created your printer stations with the option to automatically print orders toggled ON, we would expect these order tickets to print when it's time to make the order.

If you're still running into issues after setting your prep times, please get in touch with our Support Team directly at 1-855-700-6000 between 6 am - 6 pm Pacific Time Monday - Friday.

[faheem]

@ardensrowayton I would add that this is a Square Online feature that does not impact BentoBox online orders. However, if you set up a Square Online ordering page and link it from your BentoBox site, it will work properly.