Routing tickets by service area

[edwardmaloney]

Hi all, I've seen a lot of community posts regarding various ways to route tickets (e.g. by prep station) but I was wondering if there's a way to route tickets by service area. We have two printers on either side of our main bar and for extra busy nights/events I'd love to route one particular service area to the unused ticket printer to streamline our bar operations. For example:

Service area 1 and 2 print to ticket printer 1 on regular nights. Receipts can be printed at ticket printer 2, but only at one toast POS. Otherwise ticket printer 2 is unused. Can I route service area 2 tickets to printer 2?

Has anyone had any success in this? Is this a device set up matter or a toast web matter? I would hate to create a duplicate menu of all the same drinks and have servers do the extra work of selecting between service area 1 menu and service area 2 menu. 

Any help would be much appreciated!

[rcmck]

Combination of toast web and device depending on how you have service areas setup (by device or assigned to tables) but you would just use item routing by service area and reroute drinks from one prep station to another (would need to setup 2nd drink prep station with that printer assigned). Do you use the other printer for receipts normally? If not you could assign the backup printer for it to be the 1st prep station printer, then just shut it off when you don't want to use it and tickets will go back to the original drink station. If you do use that printer normally you would have to manually change the item routing when you want to use it. https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Print-Routing-by-Dining-Option#routingbyservicearea 

[nbunda · Accepted solution]

If you want to be able to swap the configuration on the fly, using only the POS (not the toast web back-end) you could also conceivably do this using the "Non-Printing Prep Stations" setting in Device Setup instead of using routing rules. It would have to be changed on each POS individually, but here's how it would work:

1. Set up two prep stations for the bar - one separate prep station for each ticket printer at the bar (I'll call these prep stations "Bar 1" and "Bar 2"
2. Assign ALL bar drinks to BOTH prep stations
3. On every POS in service area 1, set the "Non-Printing Prep Stations" setting to the Bar 2 prep station, so those drinks only ever print at the Bar 1 Prep station
4. For normal nights: on every POS in service area 2, set the "Non-Printing Prep Stations" to the Bar 2 prep station, so those drinks only ever print at the Bar 1 prep station
5. For busy nights: on every POS in service area 2, set the "Non-Printing Prep Stations" to the Bar 1 prep station, so those drinks only ever print at the Bar 2 prep station
   
   

[edwardmaloney]

This super helpful, thank you!!!