Customer screens
The board on the wall that customers read: which orders are ready to collect, or what is on the menu and what it costs. A customer screen is any browser you can point at a link — an old tablet, a smart TV, a spare laptop. Nobody signs in on it.
You set them up in Settings → Customer screens. The page only appears for owners and managers, and only in a shop that has the customer display add-on switched on (Settings → Add-ons).
The two boards
| Board | Shows | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Order status | Two columns — Preparing and Ready to collect — with the order number in each, big enough to read from the door. | Over the collection point, where people wait. Any shop where the customer waits for their food or their coffee. |
| Menu board | Your own products, grouped by category with prices, turning the page on its own every twelve seconds. | Above the counter, where people order. It shows what you already sell — there is no second menu to keep up to date. |
A shop can have both, and can have several of each: two order boards at opposite ends of a counter is a normal thing to want. Each screen gets its own link, so you can switch one off without touching the others.
It reads the same orders the kitchen display does. In a shop that does not send anything to a kitchen, the order board has nothing to show — the menu board is the one you want.
Adding a screen
- Open Settings → Customer screens and press Add a screen.
- Choose Order status or Menu board. One screen shows one board; that is fixed when you create it.
- Give it a name. Use the place, not the device — "Front window", "Above the till", "Counter TV". It is how you tell screens apart later, when one of them needs switching off and you cannot remember which tablet was which.
- Press Create the link.
That is the whole of it. There is no account to make for the screen, no password to set, and nothing to install on the device.
Getting the link onto the screen
The link is long and random, so the one thing you must never do is try to type it. The page offers three ways round that, and you are meant to pick the one that matches where the screen actually is.
| The screen is… | Do this |
|---|---|
| The machine you are on right now | Press Open the board. It opens in a new tab. Full-screen the browser and walk away. |
| A tablet or a TV across the room | Press E-mail the link to me. Open the message on the tablet, tap the link, then full-screen the browser. Nothing is typed and nothing is signed in to. |
| Something you can paste into | Press Copy link and paste it wherever both devices can see it — your own notes app, a chat you are signed in to on both. |
Once the link is open on the screen, put the browser in full screen and leave it. The board asks for new orders every few seconds by itself, holds the last thing it knew if the network drops, and picks up again on its own when the network comes back. It has no buttons, so there is nothing for a passer-by to press.
The page will warn you. Those addresses mean "this device", so on a tablet the link would point at the tablet itself and show nothing. You need the address other machines on your network use to reach the app — ask whoever set the app up which one that is.
The link is shown once
The link is a credential: anyone who has it can watch that board. So it is shown once, on the panel that appears when you create the screen, and never again. There is no "show it to me again" button anywhere, and adding one is not on the list — the shop only stores a fingerprint of the link, not the link itself, so nobody can look it up. Not you, not support, and not somebody who gets a copy of the database.
That also means a photograph of this settings page is not a working credential, which is the point of doing it this way.
Nothing can recover it. Switch that screen off, add another one, and pair the new link. It takes about twenty seconds and it is the honest answer — a system that could hand you the old link back is a system that could hand it to anybody.
What the settings page does keep, so you can tell your screens apart, is the name you gave it, which board it drives, the date you added it, the first few characters of its link, and when the screen was last seen:
| It says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Showing now | The screen asked for the board within the last couple of minutes. It is on. |
| Last seen 3 hours ago | It has stopped asking. The device is off, asleep, or off the network — worth a look. |
| Never opened | The link was created but nobody has ever opened it on a screen. |
| Switched off — this screen shows nothing | You revoked it. See below. |
Switching a screen off
A tablet walks out of the building, a screen goes in a skip, a link ends up somewhere it should not have. Press Switch off beside that screen and confirm.
What happens next, precisely:
- The board on the wall stops within a few seconds — the next time it asks for orders, which is every few seconds. It does not wait for anybody to reload it.
- What the wall shows instead is a plain dark panel reading This display is not showing. It does not show a login page, an error code, or anything belonging to your shop.
- That link is dead for good. It cannot be turned back on, and the same link will never work again anywhere.
- To get that screen going again you add a new screen and pair it with a new link.
- The row stays in the list, marked switched off, so you can see what was there. Every other screen carries on untouched.
The confirmation says all of this before it does anything, so switching off the wrong screen takes two mistakes rather than one.
How the boards look
One choice for every screen in the shop, under How the boards look. There are three themes and no colour picker, because each theme has been measured for readability from across a room and a hand-picked colour cannot be. Each one is previewed as a small board, not a swatch.
| Theme | Best for |
|---|---|
| Midnight | Dark and calm. Easy on the eye at night, and photographs of food look their best on it. This is the default. |
| Daylight | Bright and photo-led, like a fast-food board. Best when most of your items have a picture. |
| Ink | Plain black and white, colour only for order state. The most legible in harsh light or bright sun. |
The same section decides how much an order tile says about whose order it is — Sarah B, or Sarah, or the number alone — and whether the short reference is printed underneath for when two names look alike. Whichever you pick, a surname, a phone number and an e-mail address are never put on a public board. That is not a setting; it is refused.
Last are the two timers: how many seconds the queue holds the screen, and how many seconds each promotion gets. An order that is ready pins the board to the queue whatever the timers say, so a promotion can never be what is on screen at the moment somebody's food reaches the counter.
The promotions slot
The band beside the queue on the order board. It only appears while the queue is short — once the shop is busy the board is a queue board and nothing else, because a promotion must never push a ready order off the screen.
Two things can fill it, and the settings page keeps them separate on purpose so you know where to go to change each one:
| Source | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Your live promotions | The discounts already running on the Promotions page — active, and inside their dates. The board reads them; it does not own them, and there is nothing to re-type here. One tick box turns the whole lot on or off for the board. The wording is composed from the promotion's value ("10% off", "Buy 2, get 1"); a promotion whose value cannot be put in a sentence shows its name alone. |
| Your own notices | Typed here, and only here. For the things a discount cannot say — "Closed Monday", "Now hiring", "Card payments only today". A heading and an optional smaller line underneath. |
- Type the notice, and a smaller line under it if you want one.
- Press Add this notice.
- Use the ↑ and ↓ buttons to put them in the order they should appear, and ✕ to remove one.
- Press Save the promotions slot. Every screen picks the change up within a few seconds — there is nothing to restart.
Twelve notices is the limit. A board that takes two minutes to come back round to the queue is not a promotion, it is a screensaver.
Ask for a suggestion
Optional, and behind a button. Suggest a board looks at what your shop actually has — how many items, how many carry a photograph, what sells — and proposes a theme and a layout, with the reason in plain words. Tell it whether the screen is hung landscape or portrait first; a tall screen is not a rotated wide one and the answer differs.
Nothing it says is applied until you say so. The only part you can accept from that panel is the theme — the suggested category order, the hero item and any shorter wording for names that read like stock codes are advice about your catalogue, and this screen will not edit your products behind your back. Press No thanks and the whole proposal goes away.
If no AI provider is configured for your installation, the panel says so on the suggestion itself rather than passing off a canned answer as advice. If the provider is configured but unreachable, you get the error — not a guess wearing an AI badge.
The paper menu
The same menu as the wall board, laid out for A4 in two columns, plain black on white. One source, so a price cannot differ between the wall and the table — and deliberately not the board's dark theme, because a menu that costs a cartridge a sheet does not get printed twice.
- Press Print the paper menu.
- Your browser's own print box opens. Choose the printer and print — or choose Save as PDF to get a proper document with selectable text, which is how you e-mail it or send it to a print shop.
Sold-out items are printed struck through and marked, rather than dropped, for the same reason they are on the board: an item that vanishes while somebody is reading is more confusing than one that says why it went.
The sheet is built from the same live board data the wall screen shows, and reaching that data needs a board link. So printing creates one that lasts a day, reads the menu once, and switches it off again straight away. You will see it in the list of screens, already marked switched off. It is listed rather than hidden because a credential the shop cannot see is worse than one it can.
When something is wrong
| On the wall | What it means |
|---|---|
| Connecting… | First load. If it stays, the screen cannot reach the app — check the address and the network. |
| This display is not showing · Display token is not valid for this board | The link has been switched off, has expired, or was mistyped. Add a screen and pair the new link. |
| A small mark in the corner of a working board | The board is still showing what it last knew, but that is now more than thirty seconds old — the network has gone. It holds the last good screen rather than blanking, and clears the mark by itself when the network returns. |
| An empty menu board | Nothing in your catalogue is listed at this shop. See Products & menus. |
A board never shows a login page. That is the whole reason a screen gets its own link instead of a staff sign-in: a session would expire mid-service and put a password box on the wall in front of your customers.