Age timers

Every ticket on the board carries an age timer: how long the order has been waiting. The timer is the kitchen’s pacing tool. It tells the line which orders are getting old and need to move.

What the timer counts

The age timer counts up from when the order entered the kitchen queue. As an order sits, its number climbs, so a glance across the board tells you the order of the day: oldest tickets are the ones with the largest age.

The red threshold

You set a single age threshold in the console settings, the KDS age threshold, expressed in seconds. When a ticket’s age crosses that threshold, the ticket turns red.

• Under the threshold: the ticket shows in its normal color.
• At or over the threshold: the ticket turns red to flag that it has been waiting too long.

Pick a threshold that matches your kitchen’s target ticket time. A fast counter might set it low so anything lingering stands out; a kitchen with longer cook times sets it higher.

Color by age

Beyond the single red threshold, tickets are colored by age so the board reads as a priority list at a glance. The oldest, most urgent tickets are the most visually prominent, which keeps the line working the right order without having to read every timer.

Changing the threshold

The threshold is a restaurant setting, not a per-ticket setting. Change it once in the console and it applies to the whole board. Existing tickets re-evaluate against the new threshold, so raising or lowering it takes effect immediately across the board.

Why it lives in settings

The threshold sits alongside your other operational settings (opening hours, tax rate, pickup estimate, accepting-orders kill switch). It is part of how you tune the kitchen for your own pace, and like the other settings it is owned by the restaurant rather than baked into the app.