Things fail during service, not during training. What follows is ordered by how often it actually happens.
The internet is down
Modern terminals generally keep taking orders offline, holding them locally and syncing when the connection returns. Card processing is the part that degrades — some systems store card transactions for later processing, which shifts the risk of a declined card onto you.
Find out exactly what your configuration does before you need to know, and write the answer somewhere the closing manager can find it at 9pm. The two questions that matter: can we still send food to the kitchen, and can we still take cards?
Keep a paper fallback. A pad of tickets and a printed copy of the menu with prices costs nothing and has saved a great many services. Cash handling during an outage should have a written rule, decided calmly in advance.
A printer has stopped
Work through it in this order, because this is the order of likelihood:
- Paper, and the roll seated correctly. Most “dead” printers are out of paper or have it in backwards.
- Power and cable, at both ends. Kitchen cables take physical abuse.
- The network light. A printer on wi-fi that has lost its connection looks identical to one that is broken.
- Routing configuration — if one category stopped printing while others still work, the printer is fine and the routing changed.
- Reroute to another station as a stopgap, so service continues while you fix the real problem.
A card reader will not connect
Usually pairing or power rather than a fault. Check the reader is charged, confirm it is paired to the terminal in front of you rather than one across the room, and restart the reader before the terminal. Keep one spare reader charged and paired at all times — it converts a service-stopping failure into a thirty-second swap.
A check is missing
Almost always still open rather than gone. Look for it under a different server, a different order type, or a table that was merged into another. Transferred checks move to the receiving employee and vanish from the original list, which surprises people the first time.
The kitchen is getting the wrong tickets
This is a configuration problem, not a staff problem. Routing lives on the menu item. If salads print at the grill, a menu item was edited, duplicated, or created without its station set. Fire one test item per category to find which ones are misrouted, then fix the item rather than retraining the server.
Someone needs a manager override and no manager is there
An operational failure disguised as a technical one. Every shift needs at least one person present with override authority. If that is not true of your rota, fix the rota — the alternative is either a guest waiting or a manager PIN being shared, and the second is worse than the first.
Before you call support
Have these ready and the call gets dramatically shorter: which device (by its physical label), what exactly happens versus what you expected, when it started, whether it affects one device or all of them, and what changed recently — a menu edit, an update, a new printer. “It stopped working” buys you twenty minutes of questions you could have answered in advance.