Stations

A prep station is an area of your kitchen — Bar, Grill, Fries, Dessert. Once you have them, a ticket can be split so the bar only sees drinks and the grill only sees grilled food, instead of every cook reading every order.

Small kitchens do not need this. One screen showing everything is simpler, and Kassly works fine that way. Set up stations when two people are working from the same ticket and getting in each other's way.

Needs the Kitchen Orders & Tables add-on (₱400 per branch each month), in the Kitchen Pack (₱1,399 a month) and the Everything Bundle (₱2,999 a month). See Plans & add-ons.

Two things called "station"

This trips people up, so get it straight before you start. Both live under DINING in the sidebar:

Sidebar item	What it is	Address
Prep Stations	An area of the kitchen: Bar, Grill, Fries	/app/stations
KDS Stations	A physical screen you have paired to Kassly	/app/kds-stations

Prep stations are unlimited and free with the add-on. Paired screens are capped — one per branch included, more at ₱100 each per month. Buying "another KDS station" buys a monitor slot, not a prep area. Pairing is covered in Kitchen Display System.

This page is about prep stations.

Creating a prep station

Open Prep Stations and press Add Station.

Field	Notes
Name	What the cook sees: Bar, Grill, Fries
Color	A colour picker. It becomes a stripe along the top of that station's cards and column
Icon	Free text, and there is no icon picker, so leave it alone
Order	Where the station sits on the Wall screen. Leave blank and it goes last
Branch	Pick a branch, or leave it on All branches to make the station available everywhere
Categories	Tick the product categories whose items should route here
Active	Turn a station off to hide it from the kitchen screens without deleting it

The list then shows each station with its branch, how many Categories point at it, how many product-level Overrides it has, whether it is active, and its order.

Only owners and managers can create, edit or delete a station, and the sidebar link is shown to them only.

How an item finds its station

Routing is by product category. When a sale is rung up, each line looks up the category it belongs to, finds the station that category is assigned to, and that station is stamped onto the line.

So the work is one-off and it is done from the station, not from the product: open the station, tick the categories that belong to it, save. A category can only point at one station.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• The station is stamped at the moment of the sale, not looked up later. Re-pointing a category tomorrow does not move tickets that are already on the kitchen screen, and it does not rewrite history. Whatever the routing said when the order was rung is what that ticket carries forever.
• A category with no station leaves its items unrouted. That is fine on a single screen showing everything, but see the warning below.

The per-product override does not work. The product form shows a Prep station (override) dropdown, defaulted to Inherit from category, once you have at least one station. Setting it appears to save but the value is discarded, and the field is always blank again when you reopen the product. The Overrides column on the Prep Stations list will therefore always read 0. Route by category only, and split a category if one item genuinely belongs somewhere else.

Choosing a station on the kitchen screen

On the Kanban and Grid screens there is a station picker next to the branch selector. Pick a station and the board narrows to that station's items; the choice is remembered in that browser.

• The "show everything" option is called All Stations.
• The picker disappears entirely when you have no prep stations, which is why a new store sees no station control at all.
• On a screen that was paired to a specific prep station, there is no picker. The lock is enforced by Kassly itself, so the device cannot look at another station's work.

The Wall screen ignores the picker and shows one column per station side by side. That is the view for an expediter who needs to see all stations at once.

Items with no station

An item that is not routed anywhere is visible on a board showing All Stations, and it appears on the Wall screen in a column called Unassigned.

An unrouted item is invisible to a station-locked screen. If you pair a tablet to "Grill" but never tick any categories for Grill, that tablet shows an empty board — for ever — while the sale goes through perfectly normally. Set your categories up first, and check the Unassigned column on the Wall screen from time to time to catch anything that slipped through.

The same applies to the station-only kitchen ticket: printing a station's ticket for an order with no lines for that station prints a header and 0 item(s), with no warning.

Turning a station off or deleting one

Active off hides a station from the kitchen screens and the picker while leaving everything else alone. That is the safe way to retire an area temporarily.

Deleting one is also safe: every category and product that pointed at it, and every screen paired to it, is unhooked and falls back to showing everything. Tickets already on the board keep the station name they were stamped with. The station row itself is kept behind the scenes, so a deletion is recoverable with support's help.

Limits

• A category's routing is only visible from the station. Nothing on the category screen tells you a category is routed to the Bar — the only place to see or change it is a station's category list.
• There is no drag-to-reorder. Position is the numeric Order field.
• Station colours are free-form hex, not a fixed palette, so nothing stops you picking two colours a cook cannot tell apart.
• Stations are not covered by the English / Filipino switch on the kitchen screens; this page and the Prep Stations screen are English only.