The Toadee Blog

Bar Staff Scheduling: How to Build a Weekly Schedule That Holds

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Most bar schedules are built the same way: last week's copy, a few text messages, and a manager working it out at the end of a long shift. It works until someone quits, two people ask for the same Saturday off, or a new hire ends up closing alone.

The same is true in a restaurant, with more roles to cover: line cooks, a dishwasher and a host as well as servers.

A schedule that holds is built from a few pieces you set up once. After that, the weekly job is filling in names.

Start with the shifts, not the people

Before you think about who is working, write down what the venue needs. For each day you are open, define the standard shifts and how many people each one takes:

Friday opening, 3 PM to 9 PM: one bartender, one server.
Friday closing, 8 PM to 2 AM: two bartenders, one barback, one door.

A restaurant's list looks different but works the same way:

Saturday lunch, 10 AM to 3 PM: two line cooks, one dishwasher, three servers, one host.
Saturday dinner, 4 PM to 10 PM: three line cooks, one dishwasher, four servers, one host.

This is the step most venues skip, and it is why every week feels like starting over. Once the shifts exist, a schedule is a list of slots to fill, and a gap is easy to see.

In Toadee you define standard shifts under each day's business hours, and Copy to all days applies one day's shifts across the week. Overnight shifts are handled properly: a bar that closes at 2 AM is open until 2 AM the next morning.

Record availability once

Stop keeping availability in your head or in a group chat. Record each person's regular weekly availability on their staff record, including split windows such as mornings and late nights but not afternoons.

Do the same for roles. A bartender who can also work the door, or a server who can host, is worth knowing about on the night you are short. Toadee comes with Bartender, Kitchen, Server and Manager roles, and you can rename them or add your own, such as Line Cook, Host or Barback.

Fill the week, then fix it by hand

With shifts and availability in place, most of the schedule can be filled in for you.

Toadee's Suggest weekly schedule works through each standard shift and picks staff by their availability, the roles they can work, and their target and maximum hours. It respects approved time off and the scheduling rules you have set. You see a preview first, with how many positions it filled and warnings for any it could not, and nothing is saved until you apply it.

Then make your own changes. No suggestion knows that two of your bartenders work best together or that someone asked for extra hours this month. When you add or move a shift yourself, you are warned if it falls outside that person's availability or overlaps a shift they already have.

A coverage row on the week view flags standard shifts that are still unfilled, so the gaps are visible before Friday.

Publish on a fixed day

A schedule that changes without notice is the fastest way to lose good staff. Pick a day, publish then, and keep to it.

Work in drafts until you are ready. In Toadee new shifts are drafts that staff cannot see. Publish week releases them, and each person then sees their own shifts under My Shifts in the Service App. You can build next week during a quiet hour without anyone reading a half-finished plan.

Handle time off in one place

Time-off requests sent by text get lost. Send them all through one channel with a clear approve or decline.

In Toadee, staff requests are approved or declined on the Time Off page, and approved leave is respected the next time you generate a schedule. Nobody is booked on a day they were told they could have.

Set your limits before you need them

Decide your rules up front and let the schedule enforce them:

A default maximum number of hours per week, and an overtime threshold.
Minimum ages for particular roles, such as nobody under 21 behind the bar.
A curfew and weekly hour limit for minors, if you employ any.

Toadee lets you set these under Scheduling Rules, and a limit set on an individual employee overrides the venue default. These are guardrails that you configure. The software does not know your state's law or your licence type, so check the rules that apply to you and set the limits to match.

Check what actually happened

The schedule is a plan. The time clock is what happened. Compare them every week.

Look for three things:

No-shows: a scheduled shift with no clock-in.
Variance: people who regularly work more or fewer hours than scheduled.
Labor cost against sales: what the week's hours cost as a share of what the venue took in.

Toadee shows the projected labor cost of a week as you build it, compares scheduled hours with clocked hours for each employee, and reports labor as a percentage of sales. If Tuesday nights or weekday lunches cost more in wages than they bring in, you will see it in a table.

The weekly routine

Approve or decline time-off requests.
Generate a suggested week and adjust it by hand.
Check the coverage row for unfilled shifts.
Publish on your fixed day.
The following week, compare scheduled hours with actual hours.

Scheduling, the time clock and staff reports are part of Toadee's Pro plan. See the pricing page for the full comparison, or read how to spot bar shrinkage for the other half of keeping costs under control.

Why Faster Bar Service Means More Revenue

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

On a slow night, the limit on your sales is how many people walk in. On a busy night it is something else: how many orders your staff can take, make and deliver in an hour. Every guest who gives up waiting for a second round is money that was in the room and did not reach the register. In a restaurant the same limit shows up as table turns: a table that waits ten minutes to order and ten more to pay is a table the next party cannot sit at.

That makes wasted staff time a revenue problem, not only a cost problem. An hour saved on a Friday is not an hour of wages. It is an hour of serving.

Where a shift actually goes

Follow one round of drinks for one table, served the usual way:

Walk to the table and take the order.
Walk to the terminal and key it in.
Make the drinks, or wait for them.
Carry them to the table.
Later, bring the check.
Take the card, walk to the terminal, run it, walk back.
Collect the signed slip and close the tab.

Only two of those steps are the job the guest is paying for: making the drink and bringing it. The rest is carrying information and cards back and forth.

Do the arithmetic for your own bar

There is no honest universal number for how much time this costs, because it depends on your room. You can work out your own in ten minutes on a busy night.

Count the trips a server makes for one table that are not delivering food or drink.
Time one of them.
Multiply by the tables served in a shift.

Here is an example with made-up numbers, to show the method. Say a table takes five such trips at 90 seconds each. That is seven and a half minutes a table. A server who handles 30 tables on a Friday spends nearly four hours of the shift on trips that deliver nothing.

Your numbers will differ. Whatever they are, that is the time you are trying to get back.

Let guests do the keying

The biggest single change is to stop being the messenger.

With phone ordering, guests scan a code at the table, order from the menu, and the order goes straight to the board behind the bar. In Toadee each order arrives as a ticket with the table number, the items, any modifiers and notes, and the guest's name. Nobody takes the order and nobody types it in.

Several of the steps above disappear:

Taking the order and keying it. The guest does both.
Finding the right table. The table number is on the ticket.
Telling the guest it is ready. Marking a ticket Ready sends the guest a notification, with a short message if you want one, such as "Come grab it at the bar."
The check and the card. The guest opens a tab with a saved card, closes it from their phone and adds the tip there. There is no slip to carry.

Mistakes fall too. An order the guest typed is an order nobody misheard over the music, and a remake costs both stock and time.

Small things that add up behind the bar

Past ordering, a good share of lost time is repeated checks and questions.

ID checks. In Toadee, orders with age-restricted items are flagged for an ID check. Once staff tap Verify ID, that guest shows as verified for the rest of the night at your venue, so they are not asked again each round.
Knowing what is late. Tickets are colour-coded by wait time, from green under five minutes to red past fifteen. Staff can see which order needs attention without anyone asking.
Buying time when you are slammed. Staff can pause the bar or kitchen route for a set number of minutes. Guests see a notice that you are briefly catching up, and ordering resumes on its own.
Splitting the work. Each menu category is routed to the bar or the kitchen, and the board can be filtered by route. One order with two beers and two burgers shows up in both places without a server carrying a ticket to the pass.
Fair timing for food. The wait-time colours can be set per category, so a burger is not flagged red on the same clock as a draft beer.

The manager's hours count too

Owners and managers lose time in a different place: the office. These are the hours that get done at 2 AM or on a day off.

The schedule. Building a week by hand is one of the longest recurring jobs a manager has. In Toadee, once you have defined your standard shifts and each person's availability, Suggest weekly schedule fills the whole week in one step. It picks staff by availability, the roles they can work and their target hours, and respects approved time off. You see a preview and adjust it before anything is saved. The job changes from building a schedule to checking one.

Clocking in. Staff clock in and out on the Service App with their own PIN. Nobody has to find a manager, and a forgotten clock-out closes on its own at the end of the business day.

Payroll. Hours, overtime, tips and gross pay are worked out per employee for the pay period, from the same time clock. Nobody adds up timesheets.

Closing out the night. The Daily Close puts sales, payments by type, tax, comps, voids and cash over or short on one page. That replaces pulling numbers from several places after close.

Ordering stock. With inventory set up, low-stock items raise an alert, and Toadee can generate a purchase order from them. The weekly walk through the stockroom with a clipboard gets shorter.

The books. Closed tabs can sync to QuickBooks Online as sales receipts, so nobody types the day's sales in a second time.

None of these is dramatic alone. Together they are several hours a week that a manager can spend on the floor, with staff, or at home.

What to do with the time

Time you get back is only worth something if it goes somewhere. Decide in advance where:

More guests per server. The same team covers a fuller room.
Faster table turns. In a restaurant, minutes saved at ordering and at payment are minutes the next party is seated sooner. See how to turn tables faster.
Faster second rounds. The guest with an empty glass is the easiest sale in the building.
Better service. A server who is not running cards has time to check on a table and suggest something.
Fewer stressed shifts. Staff who are not behind all night stay longer, and hiring is its own cost.

Start with one measurement

Before you change anything, time one busy shift. Count the trips, as above, and write the number down. Then change one thing and count again. A change you measured is one you can decide to keep.

Phone ordering, tabs and the live order board are included on every Toadee plan, including Free. Reports and the Daily Close are on Basic and up, and scheduling, the time clock, payroll, inventory and QuickBooks sync are on Pro. The pricing page has the full comparison. For setup, see QR code ordering for bars, and for the scheduling side, how to build a weekly schedule that holds.

How to Ban a Problem Customer From Your Bar, and Make It Stick

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Most difficult guests are having one bad night. A few are a pattern. They harass a server every time they come in, start arguments with other tables, or walk out on a tab and return a month later as if nothing happened.

The same happens in restaurants, where the pattern is more often abuse of servers or repeated disputed checks.

Owners often put off dealing with them. The guest spends money, a confrontation is unpleasant, and nobody wants to be the bar that bans people. Waiting usually costs more than acting.

What a problem guest really costs

The tab is the smallest part of it.

Staff. A server who is harassed by the same person every Friday will eventually stop working Fridays, or stop working for you. Replacing a good bartender costs far more than one regular spends in a year.
Other guests. People rarely complain about the table next to them. They just do not come back, and you never learn why.
Time. Every incident takes a manager off the floor, often at the busiest point of the night.
Risk. A fight or an injury in your venue can become a licensing or insurance problem.

Seen that way, banning someone is not turning away business. It protects the business you get from everyone else.

A bad night or a pattern?

Two different problems need two different tools.

Situation	Right response
A guest has had too much tonight	A cut-off for the night. They are welcome back tomorrow
A guest was rude once, then apologised	A conversation, and a note for the team
Harassment of staff or other guests	A ban
Violence, threats or a fight	A ban
Repeated walkouts or disputed charges	A ban
The same "one bad night" for the third time	A ban

For the first case, see how to cut off a guest without a scene. The rest of this article is about the lasting decision.

Where most bans fail

Deciding is the easy part. Making it hold is harder, and the usual ban fails in a predictable way.

The manager who made the decision works Thursday to Saturday. The guest comes back on a Tuesday. The bartender on shift was hired last month, has never seen this person, and serves them. By the time anyone notices, the guest has been drinking for an hour and removing them is a second incident.

A list of names behind the bar helps only if every member of staff reads it and can match a name to a face. In a busy bar with staff turnover, that does not last.

A ban has to be enforced by something that is there on every shift.

Blocking a patron in Toadee

In Toadee, a ban is a block on the guest's account, set once in the admin portal.

Open Blocked Patrons.
Search for the guest by username or display name, and select them.
Add a reason. It is optional, but write one.
Confirm.

From then on that guest cannot open a tab or place a signed-in order at your venue. When they try, the option is disabled with a message explaining that the venue has blocked them. It works the same on a Tuesday with a new hire behind the bar as it does when the owner is standing there.

Some details worth knowing:

It applies to your venue only. The guest's account, their use of the rest of the app, and their standing at every other venue are untouched. You are deciding who you serve, not passing judgement on them anywhere else.
Close any open tab first. If the guest has a tab open, settle it before you block them, so no charge is left unresolved.
There is a record. The Blocked Patrons list shows who is blocked, the reason, when, and who did it.
It can be undone. You can unblock anyone from the same list at any time.

Each tab and order in Toadee also shows the guest's profile photo, which helps staff recognise who is in front of them.

One limit to be honest about: a block stops ordering through the guest's account. It does not stop someone walking through the door or ordering at the bar without an account. Your staff still need to know who is not welcome, and for serious cases they need to know what to do if that person turns up. The block removes the easiest way back in, and it means the decision does not depend on anyone's memory.

Ban for behaviour, and write it down

A ban is easier to defend, to your staff and to anyone else, when it follows a few rules.

Ban for what someone did, not for who they are. You can refuse service for conduct. You cannot refuse it on grounds that discrimination law protects, and those rules differ by state and city. If you are unsure, ask a lawyer before you act.
Record the reason at the time. "Grabbed a server's arm, 14 March, second incident" is useful in six months. "Trouble" is not. This is what the reason field is for.
Let a manager decide. Any member of staff should be able to stop serving a guest tonight. A lasting ban should be a manager's call, made the next day and not in the heat of it.
Apply it evenly. If a ban depends on whether the guest is a friend of the owner, your staff will notice.

Telling the guest

If the guest is in front of you, keep it short, calm and private, with a second member of staff nearby.

"After what happened on Friday, we're not able to serve you here any more."

Do not debate the details, and do not do it while they are drinking. If there is any chance of violence, do not do it alone, and call the police if someone refuses to leave. No tab is worth an injury to your staff.

Often you will not need the conversation at all. The guest tries to open a tab, sees the message, and that is the end of it.

Bans do not have to be forever

Some should be. Violence and harassment are in that group for most owners.

Others can have an end. A guest who walked out on a tab, paid it back and apologised may deserve another chance. Decide what your rule is, such as a review after six months, and note it in the reason. Because a block can be lifted at any time, giving someone a second chance takes a minute.

A simple policy

Any member of staff can stop serving a guest for the night.
Every incident is reported to a manager before the end of the shift.
A manager decides on a ban the next day, and records the reason.
The ban is set in the system, not only on a list.
Bans other than for violence or harassment are reviewed after a set period.

Your staff will work differently when they know that a guest who mistreats them will not be back next week. That is worth more than the tab.

Patron blocking and cut-offs are included on every Toadee plan, including Free. Register your venue to set them up, or read how to prevent tab walkouts for the payment side of the same problem.

How to Cut Off a Guest at Your Bar Without a Scene

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Every bartender knows the moment. A guest has had enough, the next order is coming, and somebody has to say no. Done well, it takes thirty seconds and the guest comes back next week. Done badly, it turns into the story your other customers tell about your bar.

Most of the difference is decided before the conversation starts.

Decide early, not at the last drink

The hardest cut-offs are the late ones. By the time a guest is obviously over the line, they are also the least able to take the news well.

Train your team to act on the early signs: louder speech, fumbling with a phone or wallet, ordering faster than before, or friends starting to look uneasy. Slowing service at that point is easier than stopping it later. Offer water, suggest food, and take your time with the next round.

Say it short, and do not argue

When it is time, a few rules hold up in almost every case:

Do it quietly. Step to the end of the bar or speak at the table. An audience makes it a contest.
Make it about the bar, not the person. "I can't serve you another drink tonight" lands better than "you're drunk."
Offer something. Water, a soft drink, food, or help getting a ride.
Do not negotiate. "One more and I'll go" is the most common reply. The answer is the same, said the same way.
Tell the team. A cut-off that only one bartender knows about is not a cut-off.

That last point is where most bars fail. The guest walks to the other end of the bar, or asks a friend to order, or in a venue with phone ordering, simply orders from their seat.

Make the cut-off hold

If guests can order from their phones, a spoken cut-off is not enough. The system has to know too.

In Toadee, staff cut a guest off from that guest's tab in the Service App. There are two scopes:

Scope	What it does
86: all	Pauses all of that guest's orders for the rest of the night
86: alcohol only	Blocks only age-restricted items. Food and non-alcoholic drinks still go through

The alcohol-only option matters more than it looks. It lets you do the thing you were going to say anyway, "let me get you some food and a water," and have the ordering system agree with you.

A guest who has been cut off and tries to order sees a polite notice that the venue has paused their orders. They are not told off by an app, and your staff do not have to catch the order at the board.

This works for guests ordering from their own Toadee account. For someone ordering without an account, the cut-off still has to happen in person, at the point of order.

Let it reset tomorrow

Someone who had one too many on Friday is usually a perfectly good customer on Saturday. A cut-off should not follow them.

In Toadee the cut-off is per visit. It clears on its own at the end of the business day, and staff can lift it earlier from the same tab if things change. Nobody has to remember to undo it, and nobody gets a cold welcome a week later because of a flag nobody removed.

Know when it is a ban instead

Some situations are not about one bad night: harassment of staff or other guests, repeated walkouts, or a fight. Those call for a lasting decision made by a manager, not a shift-level call.

Blocking a patron is that tool. In the admin portal you search for the guest, add a reason for your records, and confirm. From then on they cannot open a tab or place a signed-in order at your venue. Two details worth knowing:

A block applies to your venue only. It does not affect the guest anywhere else.
If the guest has an open tab, close it first so nothing is left unsettled.

You can see who is blocked, why, when and by whom, and unblock anyone at any time.

Put it in writing for your team

Write down a one-page policy and go over it with every new hire:

The signs that mean slow down, and the signs that mean stop.
Who can cut a guest off. The answer should be anyone serving.
What to say, and what to offer.
How to record it so the whole team knows.
When to bring in a manager.

Rules on serving intoxicated guests differ by state and by licence type, so check what applies to you and build your policy around it.

Cut-offs and patron blocking are included on every Toadee plan. Register your venue to set them up, or read how to prevent tab walkouts for the payment side of a difficult night.

How to Fill a Slow Night at Your Bar

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Every bar has one: the night when the staff outnumber the guests until nine. Restaurants have them too, and often a slow lunch service as well. The rent, the lights and the wages cost the same as on Saturday, and the till does not come close.

Most attempts to fix it fail for one of two reasons. The bar picks the wrong night, or it tries something once and gives up. Both are avoidable.

Pick the night with numbers

"Tuesdays are dead" is a feeling. Before you spend money on a promotion, check it.

Look at four weeks of sales by day, and by hour within each day. You are looking for two things:

Which night is weakest, measured in sales and not in how the room felt.
When that night falls off. A night that is fine until eight and then empties needs a different fix from one that never gets going.

In Toadee, the sales reports cover any date range and break traffic down by hour, and the Daily Close records each day's peak hour. If you also use scheduling, labor as a percentage of sales shows which nights cost more in wages than they should.

Often the answer is not the night you expected. Fix the one the numbers point to.

Choose something that fits your room

An event works when it gives a specific group of people a reason to choose your bar on that night. It does not need to be big. It needs to suit the place.

Idea	Works well for	What it costs you
Trivia or bingo	Neighbourhood bars, groups of friends	A host and some prizes
Live acoustic music	Rooms where people can still talk	The performer's fee
Industry night	Bars near other bars and restaurants	A discount for service workers
A food special	Bars with a kitchen	Margin on one dish
League night (darts, pool, cornhole)	Bars with the space	Almost nothing after setup
A themed drink menu	Cocktail bars	Time to plan it
A fixed-price menu night	Restaurants	Margin, offset by a simpler night for the kitchen
Kids eat free, or a family night	Family restaurants	The cost of the kids' meals
A weekday lunch special	Restaurants near offices	Margin on one dish

The same steps work for a slow lunch or a slow dinner service. Two rules apply to all of them. Pick something your existing regulars would enjoy, because they are the ones who will bring friends. And avoid anything that only works by cutting prices across the board. A night full of guests who came only for cheap drinks does not help you much the following week.

Make it weekly

One trivia night proves nothing. People need to hear about it, mean to go, forget, and hear about it again. A slow night is fixed by habit: "Tuesday is trivia at that place."

Commit to at least six to eight weeks, on the same night, at the same time. Then judge it.

In Toadee you create an event once with a title, description, type, and start and end times, and set it to recur. You do not have to re-enter it each week.

Tell people where they are already looking

An event nobody hears about is a normal slow night with a higher bill. Use every channel you already have:

Inside the bar. Your busiest nights are your best advertising. A sign on the table, a line on the menu, and staff who mention it.
Your regulars. Tell them in person. A personal invitation works better than any post.
Where people look for somewhere to go. Your active events show to people browsing in the Toadee app, both in the Events view, where they can filter to today and by distance, and on your venue page. Guests can RSVP and comment on an event.
Your photos. A gallery that shows the room full on a good night does more than a description. Toadee lets you upload venue photos and feature your best ones, and guests who are checked in can add their own to your party wall.

Keep your hours current as well. A guest who sees "Open now" beside your name at 9 PM on a Tuesday is one step closer to walking in.

Bring back the guests you already have

The cheapest guests to fill a slow night with are the ones who already like your bar and have not been in lately.

A comp, which is a credit for a free item, with a note about the new night is a direct invitation: "We've started trivia on Tuesdays, first one's on us." Set it to expire in a few weeks so it points at the nights you are trying to build. See how to find and keep your best customers for how to choose who gets one.

Staff it to match

A new event is a guess, so staff it like one. Start with your normal slow-night crew plus one person who can be sent home if it is quiet. If the night grows, add to it. An overstaffed empty room loses more than the event could have made.

Running short is the opposite risk. If the event works and guests wait twenty minutes for a drink, they will not be back next week. Phone ordering helps here, because a small crew can serve a fuller room when nobody is taking orders by hand.

Decide whether it worked

After six to eight weeks, compare the night with the same weeks before you started:

Sales for the night. The obvious one.
Number of tabs. More guests, or the same guests spending more?
Average ticket. A full room of small tabs can be worse than it looks.
What it cost. The host, the prizes, the discount and the extra wages.
New faces. Did guests come who had never opened a tab with you before? Did any come back on another night?

That last one is the real prize. A slow-night event that pays for itself and also introduces forty new people to your bar has done two jobs.

If the numbers are flat after two months, change the event, not the night. You picked the night for a reason.

Events, specials, venue photos and sales reports are on Toadee's Basic plan and up. Comps and your listing in the app are included on every plan. The pricing page has the full comparison, and why faster service means more revenue covers what to do once the room fills up.

How to Find and Keep Your Best Bar Customers

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Ask a bar or restaurant owner who their best customers are and you will get a list of names. Ask how much each one spent last quarter, or which of them has not been in for a month, and the list gets shorter.

That gap matters. Winning back a regular who drifted away is usually cheaper than finding a new guest, and you can only do it if you know they left.

Regulars are found in tabs, not in memory

Staff remember the guests who talk the most. The guests who spend the most are not always the same people. The couple who come in every Thursday, order dinner and two rounds, and leave quietly can be worth more in a year than the loudest seat at the bar. In a restaurant it is the family at the same table twice a month, or the office that comes for lunch every Friday.

Three numbers tell you who your regulars really are:

Visits: how many times they have been in.
Spend: what they have spent in total.
Last visit: how long it has been.

A paper tab or an anonymous card swipe gives you none of these. You need tabs tied to a person.

In Toadee, every guest who opens a tab from their account appears on the Customers page in the admin portal with their last visit, tab count and lifetime spend. You do nothing to build the list. It fills in as people order.

Sort your guests into three groups

You do not need a marketing plan. You need to know which of three groups a guest is in.

Group	How to spot them	What to do
Regulars	Many tabs, recent last visit	Recognise them. Make sure staff know their names
Promising	Two or three tabs in the last month or so	Give them a reason to come back once more
Lapsed	Used to come in, last visit 30 days ago or more	Reach out before they forget you

The third group is where most bars lose money without seeing it. Nobody complains when they stop coming. They just pick another place.

Notice who stopped coming

On the Customers page you can filter by how long a guest has been away: 30, 60 or 90 days and more. Check it once a month.

Look at the lapsed guests with the highest lifetime spend first. A regular who has been gone 30 days may only have been travelling. One who has been gone 60 has probably found another bar. The earlier you act, the better the odds.

Before you send anything, ask your staff. If three lapsed regulars all stopped after the same week, something happened: a price change, a new closing time, a bartender who left. That is worth more to know than any single guest is worth to win back.

Bring them back with something small

The simplest tool is a free drink with a note.

From the Customers page you can send a comp, which is a credit for a free item. You can add a short note, limit it to a category such as draft beer, and set an expiry date. The guest is notified, and the next time they open a tab at your venue they can apply it to an eligible item.

A few things make a comp work:

Write the note yourself. "We've missed you on Thursdays" does more than the drink does.
Set an expiry. Two or three weeks gives the guest a reason to come soon.
Limit the category. A comp for a draft beer, an appetizer or a dessert keeps your cost known.
Keep it rare. Toadee caps comps at two per guest every 90 days. That is a sensible limit anyway. A guest who gets a free drink every visit stops seeing it as a gift.

Comps are also the right tool in the other direction. When a regular hits a milestone, or a table had a bad night because the kitchen was backed up, staff can send a comp from that guest's tab in the Service App.

Read what your regulars order

Knowing who your best guests are is half of it. The other half is knowing what they come for.

Toadee's sales reports show your top items, revenue by category, and traffic by hour. Read them with your regulars in mind:

If your top sellers are three craft drafts, rotating the taps is a bigger decision than it looks.
If one category brings in most of the revenue, protect it before you add something new.
If your busiest hour is earlier than you assumed, your regulars may be an after-work crowd, and a late-night promotion will miss them.
If two dishes account for most of your food sales, they are why people come. Think hard before taking either off the menu.

One limit to be clear about: this is information about behaviour. It tells you who visits, how often, and what they buy. It does not tell you a guest's age or interests, and you do not need those to run a good bar or restaurant. What a guest does at your venue is a better guide than who they are on paper.

A monthly routine

Open the Customers page and filter for guests away 30 days or more.
Sort by lifetime spend and pick the top ten.
Ask staff whether anything explains the absences.
Send each one a comp with a personal note and an expiry date.
Next month, check which of them came back.

It takes about half an hour, and it is aimed at the people most likely to return.

The Customers page and comps are included on every Toadee plan, including Free. Sales reports are on Basic and up. Register your venue to start building your list, or read how to fill a slow night for the other side: bringing new guests in.

How to Spot Bar Shrinkage: Over-Pouring, Voids and Cash

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Shrinkage is the gap between what your bar should have made from the stock it used and what it actually made. Most owners sense it long before they can prove it. The liquor order creeps up while sales stay flat, and nobody can say where the difference went.

It almost always goes to one of three places. Each needs a different measurement.

1. The bottle: over-pouring, waste and free drinks

This is the largest leak in most bars, and most of it is not theft. It is heavy pours, spilled drinks, remakes, and the occasional drink for a friend that never reached a tab.

You find it by comparing two numbers for each product:

Theoretical usage: what your recipes say you should have used, given everything you sold.
Actual usage: what really left the shelf, from your counts and deliveries.

If you sold 100 drinks that each call for 1.5 ounces of a vodka, you should have used 150 ounces. If the count says 190, you have 40 ounces to explain.

Doing this by hand means a spreadsheet and a long Sunday. In Toadee it is the Inventory Variance report. Once your menu items have recipes linked to stock, it compares theoretical usage with actual usage for each stock item and flags the ones used more than expected.

One caveat that applies to any system: the comparison is only as good as your counts. Toadee marks any item without a physical count in the period as "needs count" and does not guess. Count your top ten spirits every week before you worry about the rest.

Recipes pay off a second time. With a recipe in place, an item's cost comes from current ingredient prices, so your margins update when a vendor raises a price. You find out from a report, not from a thin month.

2. The void button

A void removes a sale. That makes it the simplest way for money to disappear at the register: ring the drink, take the cash, void the tab.

Most voids are honest. Wrong orders and kitchen errors happen every shift. So the goal is not zero voids. It is a record of every one that you can read later.

Three controls do the work:

A reason on every void. In Toadee, staff choose a reason when they void a tab, such as wrong order, customer unhappy, kitchen error or employee meal, and can add notes. Every void and refund goes to a log with who did it, why, and the amount. The log cannot be edited afterwards.

Approval for the ones that matter. With Require Manager Approval to Void turned on, a void needs the PIN of someone in a role you have marked as able to approve. That can be Manager, Shift Lead, or whichever roles you choose.

A weekly look at the pattern. The Voids & Adjustments report totals voids by type, by reason and by employee. You are looking for the outlier: one person with a much larger share of voids than everyone else on the same shifts. That is a reason for a conversation, not a verdict, but it tells you where to look.

3. The cash drawer

Cash is the hardest to trace, because once it leaves the drawer there is no record at all. The control is old and it works: count in, count out, and explain the difference.

Open each drawer with a known starting amount.
Record every paid-out (money taken for an expense) and every drop to the safe as it happens.
At close, count the cash and compare it with what should be there.

The result is your over/short. In Toadee the Cash Drawer page works it out as counted minus expected, and keeps a history per shift and per person.

Watch the pattern here too. A drawer that is a few dollars off in both directions is normal. A drawer that is short most nights, or short mainly on one person's shifts, is not.

Bring it together once a day

These numbers are most useful side by side. A night with high voids, a short drawer and a spirit running over its expected usage tells you far more than any one of them alone.

Toadee's Daily Close puts the day on one page: sales, payments by type, tax, comps, voided tabs and cash over/short. When you finalize it, the record is frozen and later changes cannot alter it. It is the page to hand to your bookkeeper.

A realistic routine

How often	What to do
Every shift	Count the drawer in and out. Give a reason for every void
Every day	Review and finalize the Daily Close
Every week	Count your top-selling spirits. Read the voids report by employee
Every month	Full inventory count. Review variance and item margins

None of this needs suspicion of your staff. Most of what you find will be heavy pours and honest mistakes, and both are fixed with a jigger and a conversation.

The tools described here are on Toadee's paid plans. The pricing page shows which plan includes each one. For how the plans compare on cost, see bar POS fees explained.

How to Turn Tables Faster Without Rushing Your Guests

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

On a full Saturday, a restaurant sells a fixed thing: seats, for a fixed number of hours. If each table turns twice, that is your revenue for the night. If it turns two and a half times, you have added a quarter to your sales without a single new seat.

The wrong way to get there is to hurry people. Guests notice a plate cleared too early or a check dropped before they asked, and they do not come back. The right way is to remove the time when nobody is enjoying anything.

Where the time goes

Break a visit into parts and it looks something like this:

Seated, waiting to be greeted.
Waiting to order.
Waiting for food.
Eating.
Waiting for the check.
Waiting to pay.
Table empty, waiting to be cleared and reset.

Only one of those is the reason the guest came. The other six are waiting, and every one of them can be shortened without the guest feeling rushed. Nobody has ever complained that the check arrived too soon after they asked for it.

Measure before you change anything

You do not need software to start. On one busy service, pick five tables and write down the time at each step above. Most owners find the same thing: the meal is shorter than they thought, and the waiting on both sides of it is longer.

Then work out your number:

Turn time is the minutes from a party sitting down to the table being ready for the next one.
Turns per service is your service length divided by turn time.

As an example with made-up numbers: a five-hour dinner service at a 90-minute turn time gives 3.3 turns. Take ten minutes of waiting out and it gives 3.75. Your figures will differ. The method is the same.

Shorten the wait to order

The first wait sets the mood for the whole meal. A guest who waits eight minutes for a menu and a drink is already unhappy.

Get a drink order within two minutes of seating. A guest with a drink is patient about everything that follows.
Let guests order when they are ready. With a code on the table, a party that knows what it wants can order straight away. In Toadee the order goes to the kitchen with the table number on it, and nothing needs to be keyed in.
Make the menu easy to choose from. A long menu slows every table. If two dishes are most of your sales, make them easy to find.

Shorten the wait for food

This part belongs to the kitchen, and it is mostly about information reaching the line quickly and correctly.

Send orders the moment they are placed. A ticket that sits in a server's pad while they take two more tables is five minutes lost before cooking starts.
Get the order right first time. A remake costs a full cook time. In Toadee, required choices such as how a steak is cooked mean a ticket cannot arrive incomplete.
Know what is late. Tickets on the Toadee order board change colour as they wait, and you can give food its own thresholds, separate from drinks. The longest and average wait are shown on the board.
Tell guests when it is ready. For collection orders, marking a ticket Ready notifies the guest.

Do not touch the meal itself

This is the part to leave alone. Guests who are eating and talking are getting what they paid for.

The only useful work here is making sure nothing interrupts it: the right food, at the right time, with a check-in two minutes after it lands. If guests want another drink or a dessert, make it easy to order one. A dessert adds a few minutes and more revenue than those minutes cost.

Fix the end of the meal

This is where the largest and least welcome wait is. The guest has finished and wants to go. They wait to catch a server's eye, wait for the check, wait for the card to be taken, wait for it to come back, and then sign.

That can easily be ten minutes at a table that is producing nothing, while a party stands at the door.

Bring the check when it is asked for, not ten minutes later. Train staff to treat a request for the check as the most urgent job on the floor.
Let guests pay from the table. With a tab in Toadee, the guest's card is on file from the start. They close the tab and add a tip on their phone when they are ready, with no wait for a card to travel to a terminal and back. Staff can also close it from their side.
Never make leaving harder than arriving. If a guest has to wave to pay you, you have built a queue at the wrong end of the meal.

Reset quickly

A table that sits dirty for six minutes is a table with a six-minute longer turn.

Clear as plates finish, where your style of service allows it.
Give one person the job of resetting on busy nights, not whoever is free.
Have the host watch for tables that have paid, not only tables that have left.

Staff to your real peak

Faster turns only help if the kitchen and the floor can absorb them. Look at your sales by hour and schedule to the real peak, which is often earlier or shorter than it feels.

Toadee's sales reports show traffic by hour, and on the Pro plan the staff reports show peak-hour coverage and labor as a percentage of sales. If your rush is 6:30 to 8:00 and your extra server starts at 7:00, you have found your problem. See how to build a weekly schedule that holds.

What not to do

Do not clear plates while others at the table are still eating.
Do not drop the check unasked at dinner.
Do not set time limits on tables unless you say so at booking.
Do not judge servers on turn time alone. A server who rushes a table gets a faster turn and a guest who never returns.

Turn time is a measure of how well the restaurant runs, not of how fast guests eat.

Table ordering, tabs and the live order board are included on every Toadee plan, including Free. Sales reports are on Basic and up, and scheduling and staff reports are on Pro. The pricing page has the full comparison. To set up ordering from the table, see QR code ordering for restaurants.

QR Code Ordering for Restaurants: A Setup Guide for Table Service

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

A QR code on a restaurant table can mean two very different things. In one restaurant it opens a PDF of the menu and nothing else. In another, the guest orders and pays from their phone, the kitchen gets a clean ticket, and the server has time to look after the table.

The code is the same. The difference is everything behind it. This guide covers what to set up, and in what order, using Toadee as the example.

Decide what you want it to do

Restaurants use table ordering in a few ways, and it helps to pick one on purpose.

Full ordering from the table. Guests order everything from their phones. It suits casual dining, patios, breweries with a kitchen, and anywhere servers are stretched.
Reorders and extras. A server takes the first order and greets the table. Guests use the code for another round, a side or a dessert without waiting to catch someone's eye.
Order and collect. Guests order at their seat or at the door and pick up from a counter.

None of these replaces your servers. It moves them from carrying orders to looking after guests.

Food needs a better menu than drinks do

A beer has no questions attached. A burger has five: how it is cooked, which side, which cheese, anything removed, any allergy. At a table, the server asks. On a phone, the menu has to.

This is where most restaurant QR setups go wrong. Set up each item so that the guest cannot send an incomplete order.

Required choices. In Toadee, a modifier group can be single choice, multiple choice or free text, and can be marked required. Make "How would you like it cooked?" and "Choose a side" required, and no ticket reaches the kitchen without an answer.
Paid add-ons. Each option can carry a price. Extra cheese, a second patty and a side upgrade are charged as the guest picks them, and the total updates before they order.
Sizes. An item with sizes shows "From" the lowest price, and the guest picks one. An add-on can cost more on a large than on a small.
Notes for the kitchen. A free-text group gives guests a place for "no onions" or "dressing on the side."
Photos and descriptions. A guest cannot ask the server what comes with the dish. Put it in the description.

A note on allergies: a free-text field is a way for guests to tell you, not a safety system. Keep your usual allergy procedure, and say on the menu that guests with allergies should speak to a member of staff.

Send food and drinks to the right place

A table orders two beers, a salad and two burgers. The bar needs to know about the beers and the kitchen about the food, and nobody should have to carry a ticket between them.

In Toadee, each menu category is assigned a route, such as bar or kitchen. Staff filter the order board by route, so a tablet in the kitchen shows only the food and one at the bar shows only the drinks. Every ticket carries the table number, the items, the modifiers and notes, and how long it has been waiting.

Give the kitchen a fair clock

Tickets on the board change colour as they wait, from green through to red. A draft beer that has waited ten minutes is late. A well-done steak that has waited ten minutes is not.

You can set the colour thresholds for all categories and then override them per category, so food gets more time than drinks. Set these to match your real cook times. A board that shows everything in red is a board the kitchen learns to ignore.

Plan for the rush

Phone ordering has one risk a server-run floor does not: every table can order in the same minute. Two tools help.

Pause a route. When the kitchen is buried, staff can pause it for a set number of minutes. Guests see a short notice that you are catching up, and ordering resumes on its own. Drinks can keep flowing while the kitchen recovers.
86 an item. When you run out of the special, mark it unavailable and it disappears from the menu until you turn it back on. Nobody orders a dish you then have to walk over and apologise for.

One thing to know: an order is sent when the guest places it. If you want starters before mains, the simplest approach is to say so on the menu or the table card: "Order your starters now and your mains when you're ready."

Let guests pay when they are ready

The end of the meal is where restaurants lose the most time. The guest wants to leave, and the server is at another table.

With a tab, the guest's card is on file from the start. They can close the tab and add a tip from their phone when they are ready, and staff can also close it from their side. No one waits for a check, and no card leaves the table. For the staffing side of this, see how to turn tables faster.

Keep the service in table service

The fair worry about QR ordering in a restaurant is that it feels cold. It does when it is used to remove staff. It does not when it is used to free them.

Greet every table. A person should still say hello, explain how ordering works, and offer to take the order the usual way.
Always offer the alternative. Some guests do not want to use a phone at dinner. Take their order the usual way without making it awkward.
Use the time you get back. Check on the food two minutes after it lands. That is what guests remember.
Stay reachable. Guests using the Toadee app can message staff with a quick request, such as more water, if you turn that setting on.

Set it up in this order

Build the menu, with required choices, add-ons and photos. You can enter items one at a time or import them from a spreadsheet.
Assign routes to each category.
Lay out the floor plan with your tables and sections, such as the patio, using the table numbers your staff already use.
Generate and print the table codes. Each table gets its own, so the kitchen always knows where the food goes.
Connect payments before any code reaches a table.
Put a tablet in the kitchen and one at the bar, with audio alerts on.
Run one quiet service as a test. Order a full meal from your own phone and follow it to the pass.

Table ordering, the menu tools, the order board and the floor plan are included on every Toadee plan, including Free. No app is needed for a guest to order from a table code. See the pricing page for what each plan adds, or register your venue to start building your menu. If drinks are most of your business, the bar version of this guide may suit you better.

Restaurant Food Cost: How to Calculate It and Keep It Under Control

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Few restaurants fail because the food is bad. Many fail because the food costs more than the owner thinks it does. A supplier raises the price of chicken by eight percent, nobody updates the menu, and a dish that made money in March loses it by June.

Food cost is not hard to control. It is hard to see. This guide covers how to calculate it, per plate and for the whole kitchen, and how to notice when it moves.

Two numbers with the same name

"Food cost" means two different things, and you need both.

Plate cost is what the ingredients in one dish cost you. It is used to set prices.

Food cost percentage is what you spent on food as a share of what you sold. It tells you how the kitchen as a whole is doing.

A restaurant can have well-priced plates and a bad overall percentage, because of waste, over-portioning or theft. The gap between the two is where the money goes.

Cost one plate

Take a dish and list everything on it, with the amount and what that amount costs you.

Here is an example with made-up prices, to show the method:

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Beef patty	6 oz	$2.10
Bun	1	$0.45
Cheese	1 slice	$0.30
Lettuce, tomato, onion		$0.35
Sauce	1 oz	$0.15
Fries	5 oz	$0.55
Plate cost		$3.90

Two things are easy to miss:

Yield. You pay for a whole onion and use most of it. You pay for raw meat and serve it cooked and trimmed. Cost the amount you buy to get the amount you serve.
The small things. Oil, seasoning, the pickle, the sauce on the side. Each is pennies. Across a year of covers they are real money.

Price it

Divide the plate cost by the menu price to get the food cost percentage for that dish.

If the burger above sells for $13, its food cost is $3.90 divided by $13, or 30%.

To work the other way, divide the plate cost by the percentage you are aiming for. At a 30% target, a $3.90 plate should be priced at $13.

There is no single correct target. It depends on your concept, your rent and your labor. A steakhouse will run higher than a pizzeria and make it up in other ways. What matters is that you choose a target, and know which dishes miss it.

In Toadee, you can enter a cost against each menu item, and the item then shows its margin beside its price. A venue-wide default markup can suggest a price from the cost. Both are in the menu tools on every plan.

Look at margin in dollars as well

A percentage can mislead you.

A pasta that costs $3 and sells for $14 has a 21% food cost and leaves you $11. A steak that costs $14 and sells for $34 has a 41% food cost and leaves you $20.

The steak has the worse percentage and pays almost twice as much per plate. You pay rent in dollars, not percentages. Judge each dish on both.

Then put that beside how often each dish sells:

Sells well, good margin: protect it. Do not change it.
Sells well, thin margin: reprice it, or adjust the portion or the recipe.
Sells slowly, good margin: move it up the menu, describe it better, have servers mention it.
Sells slowly, thin margin: take it off.

Toadee's sales reports show your top items and revenue by category, and the profit report shows margins by category from your item costs.

Keep costs current

The weakness of a costed menu is that it goes out of date the day a supplier changes a price. A sheet you built in January is fiction by summer.

The fix is to cost from recipes that are tied to what you actually pay.

With inventory set up in Toadee, each stock item carries its current cost. Link a recipe to a menu item, and the item's cost is worked out from those ingredient prices. When a vendor raises the price of beef, the cost of every dish that uses it updates, and so does its margin. You see the change in a report, not in a thin month.

Find the gap between paper and the kitchen

Now compare what you should have used with what you did.

If you sold 200 burgers at 6 ounces of beef each, you should have used 75 pounds. If your counts and deliveries say you used 90, there are 15 pounds to explain. The usual causes are, in rough order:

Portions. A cook's "6 ounces" is often 7.
Waste. Spoilage, trim, dropped plates and remakes.
Unrecorded food. Staff meals and free plates that never reached a ticket.
Theft. Less common than the first three, but it happens.

Toadee's Inventory Variance report does this comparison for each stock item and flags those used more than expected. It needs a physical count to be meaningful, and marks any item without one in the period as "needs count."

Habits that keep it down

Portion with tools. Scales, scoops and ladles. Eyeballing drifts upward.
Count your most expensive items every week. Proteins first. They are most of your food spend.
Order from what you have. In Toadee, low-stock items raise an alert, and a purchase order can be generated from them.
Record waste and staff meals. A number you write down is a number you can reduce.
Review prices when costs move, not once a year. Small, regular changes are easier on guests than one large one.
Keep the menu short. Every extra dish is more stock that can spoil.

A monthly routine

Count the full kitchen.
Work out food cost percentage for the month.
Check the variance on your ten most expensive ingredients.
Look at margins by dish, and pick the two worst that sell well.
Fix those two: price, portion or recipe.

Two dishes a month is enough. In a year you will have reviewed the whole menu.

Item costs and margin display are part of Toadee's menu tools on every plan. Sales and profit reports are on Basic and up, and inventory, recipes and the variance report are on Pro. The pricing page has the full comparison. Bars face the same problem with liquor: see how to spot bar shrinkage.

Bar POS Fees Explained: What You Actually Pay Per Tab

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Point-of-sale pricing is hard to compare because vendors quote different parts of the bill. One leads with a low monthly price, another with "free" software, a third with a processing rate. To compare fairly you need to separate the bill into its three layers and ask about each one. This applies to a restaurant as much as a bar, and the examples below cover both.

The three layers

1. The subscription

A flat monthly or annual price for the software. Ask whether it is per location, per device or per staff login, and whether the price you were quoted needs an annual commitment.

2. Card processing

What it costs to accept a card payment. It is usually a percentage of the sale, often with a fixed amount per transaction on top. Somebody has to pay it on every card sale, whichever system you use.

3. Platform or service fees

Anything the POS company adds on top of processing: a per-order fee, an online-ordering fee, or a service charge passed to the guest. This is the layer that is easiest to miss, because it is often not on the pricing page headline.

Why a fixed per-transaction fee matters on small tickets

Bars run on small tickets. So do coffee counters, lunch spots and any restaurant where guests pay for one item at a time. A fixed fee that looks harmless on a $90 dinner check is a large share of an $8 drink or a $9 sandwich.

Here is a real example from our own pricing history. Toadee's Free plan used to carry a service charge of 2.0% plus $0.30. On an $8 drink that came to 46 cents, or 5.75% of the sale. On a $60 tab the same formula was $1.50, or 2.5%. Same fee, very different bite.

We removed the fixed 30 cents on October 1, 2026 for that reason. A flat percentage costs the same proportion whether a guest buys one drink or twenty.

When you compare systems, run the numbers on your smallest common sale, not your average. A full-service restaurant with large checks will feel the percentage more than the fixed fee. A bar or a counter-service spot will feel the fixed fee more.

Hardware is a fourth cost

Terminals, card readers, kitchen display screens and printers are often sold or leased separately. A restaurant usually needs more of it than a bar: a screen or printer for the kitchen as well as the front. Ask what you must buy before you can take a first order, and what happens to that hardware if you switch systems later.

Toadee's approach is to use devices that already exist: guests order and pay from their own phones, and staff run the order board on Android tablets, one at the bar and one in the kitchen if you serve food.

Toadee's numbers, as a worked example

Here is how the three layers look for Toadee.

	Free	Basic	Pro
Subscription, annual term	$0	$24.99/mo	$36.99/mo
Subscription, month to month	$0	$29.99/mo	$42.99/mo
App service charge	3.2%	1.4%	0.7%

A few things to know about that service charge:

The guest pays it. It shows as a line on their tab. It is not deducted from the venue's earnings.
It applies to the subtotal only. It is never charged on tax or on the tip.
There is no fixed per-tab fee on any plan.
New venues get an intro rate. On the Free plan it is 1.0% for a venue's first 14 days.

On a $60 tab, the guest pays $1.92 on Free, $0.84 on Basic and $0.42 on Pro.

Card processing is separate. Each venue connects its own Stripe account, and Stripe's standard processing fees apply on that account under Stripe's own pricing.

When does a paid plan make sense?

Because the guest pays the service charge, upgrading does not put that percentage back in your pocket directly. What it does is lower the price your guests see, and unlock features: reports, events and photos on Basic, then inventory, staff tools, time clock, payroll and QuickBooks sync on Pro.

A useful rule of thumb: Basic's rate is 1.8 points lower than Free's. At about $1,400 a month in app sales, your guests save as much in service charges as an annual Basic subscription costs you. Above that level, the upgrade saves your guests more than it costs you.

One more point: accepting cash through Toadee needs a paid plan. On a paid plan, a cash sale carries no service charge at all.

Five questions to ask any POS vendor

What is the total cost on an $8 sale, and on a $60 sale?
Is there a fixed amount per transaction, and who pays it?
Which fees are charged to me and which to my guests?
Are fees calculated on tips and tax, or only on the subtotal?
What hardware must I buy, and is there a contract term?

If a vendor cannot answer the first question with a number, keep asking.

Toadee's full plan comparison is on the pricing page. The Free plan is free forever, with no card required to register your venue.

How to Prevent Bar Tab Walkouts Without Annoying Your Regulars

2026-10-06T00:00:00Z

A walked tab hurts twice. You lose the sale, and somebody on your team usually loses the tip they earned on it. The fix most bars reach for, holding a physical card behind the bar, creates its own problems: lost cards, a queue at close, and a drawer full of other people's plastic.

Walkouts come in two kinds, and they need different controls:

The guest leaves without closing. Usually forgetfulness, sometimes not.
The card fails at close. The tab was opened in good faith, but the charge does not go through.

Here is how to handle both, using the settings in Toadee as the example.

Start with a card on file

The foundation is simple: a guest cannot order until a card is attached to the tab. In Toadee this is the Require Tab for Orders setting. With it on, a patron opens a tab with a saved card before placing a first order.

This removes the "I'll pay at the end" tab with nothing behind it. It also means there is nothing to hand back at close, so nobody leaves their card at your bar.

Set the pre-authorization hold on purpose

When a tab opens, a temporary hold is placed on the guest's card. It is not a charge. The real order total is what gets charged when the tab closes, and the hold is released.

The hold proves the card is real and has funds available right now. In Toadee the default is $50, and you can change it. Two things to weigh:

Too low and the hold proves very little. A $5 hold on a table that runs up $120 has not told you much.
Too high and you tie up money on a guest's card for a quick drink, which a debit card user will notice.

A good starting point is a figure close to your typical tab. Raise it for event nights when tabs run larger.

Let staff close abandoned tabs, with auto-gratuity

The forgetful walkout is the easy one once a card is on file. Staff can close an open tab from the Tabs screen, which settles the charge to the card.

The part that gets missed is the tip. Without a rule, a tab the guest never closed settles with no gratuity, and your bartender pays for the guest's bad memory. Auto-gratuity fixes that: it is added automatically when staff close a tab a patron left without settling. In Toadee you choose the percentage, up to a cap of 20%.

Post the policy where guests can see it. An auto-gratuity nobody was told about turns into a dispute; one printed on the menu does not.

Block the riskiest cards

Prepaid and gift cards are the least reliable cards for a running tab. The balance can be spent between the moment the hold is placed and the moment the tab is charged, which leaves you unable to collect.

With Block Prepaid Cards on, a guest cannot open a tab with a card the card network confirms is prepaid. They are asked to use a credit or debit card, and no hold is placed. Credit and debit cards are unaffected, and cards the network cannot classify are still allowed, so real customers are not turned away by mistake.

This setting is off by default. It is a safeguard against the highest-risk category, not a guarantee. Any card can still come up short at close, which is why it works best together with a sensible hold.

Make it easy to match a tab to a person

A surprising share of "walkouts" are mix-ups: the wrong tab closed, or staff unsure whose tab is whose at last call. In Toadee each tab and order shows the guest's profile photo, so staff can match a tab to the person in front of them.

For the rare guest who really is a problem, you have two tools. A cut-off pauses their ordering for the rest of the night and clears itself at the end of the business day. Blocking a patron is the lasting version for someone you do not want back.

A sensible default setup

If you want a starting point, use this and adjust after a few weekends:

Setting	Starting point
Require Tab for Orders	On
Pre-authorization hold	Close to your typical tab
Auto-gratuity	A rate you already post, up to 20%
Block Prepaid Cards	On, if you have been burned before

None of this adds a step for an honest guest beyond saving a card once. That is the test of a good walkout policy: your regulars should hardly know it is there.

These controls are part of tabs and payments on every Toadee plan. Register your venue to try them, or read the FAQ for more on how tabs work.

QR Code Ordering for Bars: How It Works and What to Set Up First

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

A busy bar loses money in the gap between a guest deciding they want another round and someone taking the order. QR code ordering closes that gap: the guest scans a code at their table, orders from their own phone, and the ticket lands in front of your staff straight away.

This guide covers how it works in practice and the order to set things up in, using Toadee as the example. If you run a kitchen-led venue, see QR code ordering for restaurants for the food side: modifiers, kitchen routing and pacing.

What the guest does

They scan the QR code on the table tent.
Your menu opens in their phone's browser, already tied to that exact table.
They pick items, choose sizes and add-ons, and send the order.

There is no app to install for QR ordering. That matters more than it sounds: every extra step between "I want a drink" and "order sent" costs you orders, and a forced download is the biggest step of all.

What your staff see

Orders arrive on a live board with three working columns: New, In Progress and Ready. Each ticket shows the table, the items and quantities, any modifiers or notes, and how long it has been waiting.

The waiting time is colour-coded so a slow ticket stands out without anyone doing arithmetic:

Colour	Wait
Green	Under 5 minutes
Amber	5 to 10 minutes
Orange	10 to 15 minutes
Red	15 minutes or more

Staff tap Start when they pick a ticket up and Ready when it is done. Guests using the Toadee app get a notification either way, and staff can add a short message such as "Come grab it at the bar."

Orders with age-restricted items carry a red CHECK ID banner. Once a staff member verifies the guest, that check holds for the rest of the night, so the same person is not carded again on every round.

Set it up in this order

The order matters, because each step depends on the one before it.

1. Build the menu first

Add your categories and items with prices, and photos where you have them. Set up sizes and add-ons now, not later: a guest ordering from a phone cannot lean over the bar and say "make it a double."

2. Lay out the floor plan

Place your tables, bar seats and pickup stations on the floor plan. The table numbers you set here are the ones your staff will read on every ticket, so match them to what the team already calls each table.

3. Generate and print the QR codes

Each table gets its own code that opens the order page for that table. Print them individually or all at once on table tents.

4. Connect payments

Connect your Stripe account so tabs can be opened and settled. Do this before the codes go on the tables. A guest who scans and then cannot pay is worse than no QR code at all.

5. Put a tablet where the work happens

Pair a tablet at the bar and, if you serve food, one in the kitchen. Staff can filter the board by route, so the bar sees drinks and the kitchen sees food.

Three mistakes to avoid on the first weekend

Launching on your busiest night. Run it on a quiet weeknight first. Place a few test orders from your own phone and watch them cross the board from New to Ready.

Leaving the tablet silent. Turn on audio alerts so a new order chimes. A board nobody is looking at is the most common reason a first QR order sits for ten minutes.

Having no plan for a slammed bar. When the bar or kitchen is buried, staff can pause a route for a set number of minutes. Guests see a short "catching up" notice and ordering resumes on its own. Show your team that button before they need it.

What it costs

QR and table ordering, the order board, the floor plan and tabs are included on every Toadee plan, including the Free plan. See the pricing page for what each plan adds, or register your venue and start building your menu today.