A Kitchen Display and Staff Roles for Restaurants Without a POS System

A QR menu solves the front of the house — guests scan, browse, and order without a server taking it down by hand. That's half the problem. The other half is what happens to the order once it's placed: who sees it, who works it, and who's allowed to touch what.

StackedTables handles that half too, without requiring a POS terminal or a tablet-per-register setup. Here's how the pieces fit together.

The floor plan replaces the order list

Most QR-ordering tools show you a flat list of tickets. StackedTables shows you the room instead — a floor plan where every table sits where it actually sits, color-coded by what's happening at it right now: empty, a new order just came in, it's being prepared, or it's ready to go out.

You lay the floor plan out once, dragging tables into place (touch and keyboard both work, so this isn't a mouse-only job). After that, a glance at the console tells you which section is backed up without reading a single ticket.

Guests can call you over without flagging anyone down

The menu isn't just for ordering. A guest can tap to call the waiter, ask for the check, or flag that they need help — and it shows up live on both the order console and the waiter screen, tied to their table. No one has to catch a server's eye across a full dining room.

A real kitchen display, not a printer

Install the kitchen display on a tablet by the pass and pair it to your restaurant. From there:

• Orders bump item by item, not as a whole ticket — so a table's burger can go out while the fries are still coming.
• A cook or chef can refuse a single item with a reason, which flows back to front of house instead of just vanishing.
• The kitchen can be closed and reopened with a reason — out of an ingredient, end of service — without pulling the whole restaurant offline.
• It's installable as a standalone app on the tablet (a PWA), landscape and built for a screen mounted where the heat and the hands are, not a browser tab someone has to remember to keep open.

Staff roles, enforced — not just a label

Invite your team and assign one of five roles: manager, cashier, waiter, chef, or cook. This isn't a cosmetic title. Each role is backed by a real permission set, and each one lands on a different screen the moment they sign in:

• Manager — everything: menu, floor plan, settings, reports, staff, and kitchen control.
• Cashier — takes orders and completes payment, no menu or settings access.
• Waiter — the waiter screen: floor plan, taking and adding to orders, serving, answering table requests.
• Chef / Cook — the kitchen display: bumping items, and for chefs, refusing orders and controlling the kitchen.

A waiter can't change a price. A cook can't see a guest's payment details. Nobody has to remember to look away from a screen that isn't theirs — they're never shown it.

Why this matters more than another app

None of this needs new hardware beyond whatever tablets you already have. It's the same QR code your guests are already scanning — the floor plan, the kitchen display, and the staff roles are what's running underneath it, included with the free StackedTables account.

Set up your floor, your kitchen display, and your staff on StackedTables →