Table ordering
The round is in the kitchen before the waiter has crossed the room.
Table ordering puts the round where the guests are sitting instead of at a till by the door. A group at table eleven sends drinks while your waiter is still pouring at table four, and it lands on that waiter’s phone and on the bar screen at the same time. The service itself carries on as it always has. What comes out of the evening is the walking: the trip to key a round in, and the second trip to tell the kitchen it happened.
Half the shift goes on walking
Count the crossings on a Saturday in July. Fourteen tables on the terrace, the till inside by the door, and a waiter going through that door twice for every round: once to key it in, once so the kitchen hears about it. While that happens, a table has closed its menus and is waiting to be noticed, which is where most complaints are actually born. With ordering at the table the crossing happens once, when someone asks to settle. The rest of the shift stays outside, where the guests are.
Rounds, and the tab that stays open until they leave
A tab opens when the first guest joins it and stays open until the table settles, so the fourth round sits with the first and nothing rests on anyone’s handwriting. Guests add to it whenever they are ready, without waving at anybody. Staff see every tab in the room live, and they approve what reaches the kitchen, so the pace is still set by people who can see the floor.
- More than one tab can run on the same table, which is what a group of eight arriving in two halves usually wants.
- A guest joins a tab by scanning, or with a short code read out by someone already on it.
- Nothing reaches the kitchen until a waiter approves it.
- Each station gets only its own lines, so the bar is not reading past three mains to find a spritz.
- At settlement the bill splits by item and each person pays for what they had, from their own phone. Tips are optional and asked after the service.
Does ordering at the table change anything measurable?
Some of it has been measured, and the measurements are worth reading properly rather than in a headline. Susskind and Curry at Cornell studied 231,495 bills across 45 restaurants and found device order-and-pay associated with tables turning 15.5% faster, server time per table 65% lower, and spend $7.30 higher. Their study compares guests who used the device against guests who did not, rather than assigning them at random, and one of the authors had worked for the tablet vendor, so read it as an association. Tan and Netessine, writing in Management Science on 2.6 million transactions, found meal duration around 10% shorter, spend per bill 1% to 3% higher, and sales per minute 11% higher. Both looked at tablets bolted to the table rather than a guest’s own phone, which is not quite the thing we make. Faster turns only pay if there are people waiting at the door. If there are not, the gain is in the walking, and 1% to 3% is the honest number to plan around.
Will I need fewer waiters?
No, and we would not sell it that way. People go out to be looked after, and a room where nobody comes to the table reads as neglect rather than efficiency. What goes away is the queue of three staff at one till and the slip that has to be walked to the pass. The pad stays in the apron if a waiter likes having one, but nothing at eleven at night depends on reading it back. Your team signs in on their own phones with a personal link and a short code, scoped to their own location, and access can be pulled the day somebody leaves. Ordering from a phone stays one option beside the waiter, never the only one. A venue whose entire pitch is being waited on from the moment you sit down may want none of this, and that is a much cheaper conclusion to reach now than after the stickers arrive.
There are no tables in a food truck
One window and no seats. Pickup runs the same way with the table side switched off: a code at the counter, and an order number that starts again each morning. Guests see a rough time while they wait, something like ready in about ten minutes, refreshed as the kitchen works through the queue. They pay online when they order or at the counter when they collect, and either one closes the order cleanly. On the coast the same code goes on a parasol and the order comes to the sunbed number, which is table service with sand in it.
- Trucks and takeaway counters run on the €19 entry plan, with the table side off entirely.
- Order numbers reset daily, so the board never has to show #4,318.
- A shorter counter menu can run beside the main one, from the same catalogue.
- The estimate is a rough time that refreshes periodically. There is no countdown, because a countdown is a promise a kitchen cannot keep.
What does a floor like this cost to run?
€19 per location per month is where it starts, and each location picks its own plan, so a summer-only site is never tied to the tier the main room needs. Online payments carry 0.5% to 1% depending on the plan, and that is the only place a percentage appears. Cash and counter payments carry nothing from us. Your guests are charged nothing in any case. There is no contract underneath it and no setup fee. Nothing comes back to us if you stop either, because it all runs in the browser on phones your staff already own.
Klevra works alongside the till you already have: at settlement your waiter registers the sale and the fiscal receipt prints from your own system, exactly as now, and there is no POS integration today. Klevra does not do delivery. The 15.5% and $7.30 figures above come from one observational study of fixed tablets in American restaurants rather than from our own customers, and nobody has yet run a controlled field study of phone ordering at table service. When somebody does, we will quote that instead.
Also worth reading
Try it on the terrace first.
Make an account, upload the menu from a photograph, and put labels on a handful of tables for one service. €19 per location per month at the entry tier.