Restaurant · Guide 1

Getting Started

Welcome to the SikaBooks Restaurant module. The module extends POS and Inventory for restaurants, cafes, bars, and food-service teams that need waiter-led service, kitchen routing, table operations, bar tabs, recipes, food-cost visibility, and restaurant reporting.

Restaurant managers and service teams
Updated October 5, 2026

Use this guide for supervised staff training and daily reference. Start with your role below, then practise the matching tasks in a training business. Controls depend on your access, register, and saved settings. This guide describes the current workspace implementation; it is not a deployment confirmation or certification of a particular printer.

1.1 Prerequisites

Restaurant works with these modules:

Core — users, roles, permissions, business access, and audit boundaries.
Inventory — products, locations, stock, ingredients, and recipe costing.
POS — registers, shifts, selling, receipts, payments, and the accounting bridge.
Restaurant — menu, table, kitchen, reservation, bar-tab, and service workflows.

Licensing enables the tenant applications, while each person's workspace access and functional permissions control what appears in navigation and what actions open. Restaurant staff do not automatically receive the Inventory or Accounting workspace merely because the service flow uses their data.

The background integration continues for an authorised Restaurant transaction: POS records the sale, Inventory consumes configured ingredients or products, and Accounting receives the configured posting when enabled. Users do not need visibility into those connected workspaces for the system to complete that controlled integration.

1.2 Accessing Restaurant

Log in to SikaBooks.
Select the business, such as Kofi Foods.
Open Restaurant > Dashboard.
Use Open Sell Page to enter the Restaurant POS till. If no restaurant till is open yet, SikaBooks takes you to Start service first (section 3).

1.3 Dashboard Overview

The Restaurant dashboard gives managers a same-day operating view:

Today's Orders — number of restaurant orders recorded today.
Today's Revenue — revenue collected today, with mixed-currency awareness where needed.
Active Orders — checks or orders still open in the service flow.
Tables — occupied table count against total active tables.
Average Ticket — per-order average for today's trading.
Top Selling Items — today's leading menu items by quantity and revenue.
Quick Links — service workspace, table map, kitchen display, and user manual.
Sales by Waiter — today's takings by server.
Hourly Orders — order activity trend across the trading day.

Restaurant navigation is organised into:

Dashboard — operating KPIs and quick links.
Operations — Restaurant POS (the till) and Kitchen Display (full-screen kitchen mode).
Menu — menu items, menu categories, modifiers, and recipes.
Tables — floor and table management.
Reports — restaurant performance reports.
Administration — restaurant settings, demo data, and this manual.

1.5 Role Quickstarts

Role	Start here	Practise before working alone
Waiter / front of house	Sections 3, 5, 6, 7	Start an order with the right waiter and table or name, add dishes with their options and notes, send or print once, hand over the correct copies, and return to the same order for later rounds.
Kitchen / bar	Sections 7 and 12	Follow the order's paper or display mode, mark items ready, bump only your station, use Picked up at the pass, and check additions and cancellation notices without preparing the same batch twice.
Cashier	Sections 3, 6, 8 and 13	Start service with a counted float, find the order in the orders column, take payment in the right mode, give the change shown, issue a paid receipt, and end the shift with a counted drawer.
Supervisor / manager	Sections 2, 9, 10, 11 and 13	Confirm Service setup and permissions, resolve exceptions, review reports, and approve closing differences.
Menu / stock administrator	Sections 3, 4 and 10	Prepare active products and menu categories, recipes, locations and stations; confirm availability before service.

The waiter assigned to a dine-in order is not necessarily the cashier receiving payment. Use the waiter chip in the ticket header or ⋯ > Change waiter for service attribution, and the cashier button in the top bar (lock icon, F7; on phones ⋯ > Switch cashier) for the person operating the till. Do not share another person's PIN to bypass missing access.