Paper order slips have been the standard in restaurants for decades, and they still cause the same problems: handwriting the kitchen can't read, slips that fall behind the counter, a waiter walking back and forth just to ask "is table 6 ready?", and no clear record of what was ordered at the end of the night.
You don't need an expensive point-of-sale system to fix this. A restaurant order taking app built on a shared table, which waiters update on their phones and the kitchen watches on a screen, covers the essentials. Here is how to set it up with the Table Notes app.
How the flow works
- A waiter takes the order at the table and adds it as a new row on their phone.
- The order appears instantly on a tablet or PC in the kitchen.
- The kitchen changes the status as the dish moves along: Preparing, then Ready.
- The waiter sees the status change on their phone and collects the food.
Because everyone is looking at the same table, there is one source of truth for what was ordered and where it is.
Setting up the Orders table
In Table Notes, create a table called Orders with these columns:
- Table no. (Select: T1, T2, T3 … or Takeaway, Delivery)
- Item (Select: your menu items)
- Quantity (Number)
- Notes (Notes) for "no onion", "extra spicy" and similar requests
- Status (Select: New, Preparing, Ready, Served)
- Waiter (Select: staff names)
- Time (Time)
- Price (Amount) and Total (Formula: Quantity × Price)
Using Select columns for the table number, menu item and status matters here. Waiters tap instead of typing, orders are fast to enter during a rush, and the kitchen never has to decode handwriting or abbreviations.
Tip: one row per dish (rather than one row per table) makes it easy for the kitchen to mark each dish Ready separately, which is how a kitchen actually works.
Setting up the kitchen screen
Put a tablet or a PC in the kitchen and open the Orders table in the browser at tablenotes.net, signed in with an account the table is shared with. New orders appear as waiters add them.
Filter the kitchen view to show only orders that are New or Preparing, and save that filter. Finished dishes drop out of the view, so the screen shows only the work still to do.
Giving each person the right access
Share the table with your staff as collaborators:
- Owner or manager: administrator, can change the menu options and columns.
- Waiters and kitchen: editors, can add orders and update their status.
- Accountant or partner: viewer, can see the orders and totals without changing anything.
End-of-day numbers without extra work
Because every order is a row with a Price and a Total, the day's records are already there when you close, with no need to copy order slips into an Excel sheet. Filter by date to see the day's orders, look at the column total for the takings, or filter by item to see what sold best. Export the table as an Excel sheet if you want to analyse a month at a time in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, or as a PDF for a simple daily summary.
Beyond dine-in orders
The same approach works for other parts of running a restaurant:
- Takeaway and delivery orders, with a Phone column for the customer and a Location column for the address.
- Kitchen stock, tracked the way we describe in inventory tracking on your phone.
- Daily expenses such as vegetables and gas, with a photo of each bill (see the expense tracker guide).
- Staff attendance, with a Date, staff name and a Checkbox.
Is this right for your restaurant?
A shared table is a great fit for cafés, dhabas, cloud kitchens, food trucks and small restaurants that want to move off paper without the cost and setup of a dedicated POS. If you need printed KOT slips, card payments and billing hardware integrated in one system, a full POS is the better tool, though many owners still use a table like this for stock, expenses and staff records alongside it.
The takeaway
Taking orders on a phone and showing them instantly in the kitchen removes the most common causes of mistakes and delays: unreadable slips, lost orders and constant back-and-forth. A single shared Orders table, with Select columns and a status the kitchen updates, is enough to get there.