Restaurant and kitchen printers

This guide sets up your restaurant, bar and room service so staff can take orders, the kitchen sees them on a screen, and each kitchen order ticket (KOT) prints on a thermal printer by itself. Do the steps in the order below: each one uses the one before it.

Where to find it: Food, Events & Services → F&B Restaurant. The Kitchen screen and the Kitchen printers card are behind the Kitchen screen button at the top of that page. Who can use it: owners and managers set everything up. Staff with the kitchen, bar or service skill use the Kitchen screen. The restaurant needs the Restaurant & POS module on your plan; without it the page says "Menus, orders and KOT printing are part of the F&B module."

How to take orders, bill them and post them to a room is in Restaurant and F&B. This page is only the setup.

The setup order

1. Stations are where tickets are made and printed: the kitchen, the bar.
2. Outlets are where orders are taken: the restaurant, the bar, room service. Each outlet sends its tickets to a default station.
3. Menu categories and items are what guests order.
4. Tables let staff raise an order against a table instead of a room.
5. The Kitchen screen shows each station's tickets on a tablet at the pass.
6. The print bridge is a small program on a kitchen PC that prints every ticket.

Every new hotel already has one station, Kitchen Station (tickets prefixed KOT), and one outlet, Main Restaurant, that sends its tickets there. If that is all you have, rename them and go to Build the menu.

1. Add your stations

2. Add your outlets

On the same tab, under Revenue Centres, click Add Outlet.

Click Create Outlet. To change an outlet or station later, click the pencil next to it, change it and click Save Outlet or Save Station.

[!NOTE] A ticket prints at its outlet's Default Station. If an outlet has none, it prints at the kitchen. So an order taken in the restaurant prints in the kitchen, even for a drink. If drinks must print at the bar, take them against your bar outlet.

Only owners and managers can change outlets and stations. Others see "Read-only: You do not have permission to manage outlets or stations."

Spa, laundry, minibar and shop counters are not set up here. They are Service Outlets in the sidebar, covered in Restaurant and F&B.

3. Build the menu

Add categories first

On the Menu Management tab, click Add Category. Enter a Category Name such as "Breakfast", "Mains" or "Beverages", and click Create Category. Add all your categories before your items: an item cannot be added without one.

Then add items

The menu tab lists every item, with All Items and one chip per category, and a Search menu items... box. Mark Unavailable takes a dish off sale for now, for example when the kitchen runs out. With a photo, a dish also shows to in-house guests in the Stayantra Go app.

[!TIP] A long menu takes time to type. If you would rather not, Restaurant setup from Setup help enters it for you (150 items per outlet included).

4. Add your tables

On the Tables tab, type the table's name in Table label... (for example "T1" or "Garden 4"), the number of Seats (1 to 50, optional), and click Add (or press Enter). Repeat for each table.

Tables are a list, not a floor plan. The chips All tables, Available, Occupied and Needs cleaning filter them, and Mark clean frees a table after guests leave.

5. Put the Kitchen screen on a tablet

The Kitchen screen shows each station's tickets as they are fired, oldest first. The cook taps Ready when a ticket is cooked.

What the screen shows:

• Live (or Refreshing every 15 s), then either KOTs print automatically or No printer bridge for this station.
• One card per ticket with a timer. The card turns amber at 10 minutes and red at 20.
• Not printed — check the printer. when a ticket has not printed in time.
• Ready moves a ticket to Ready — waiting for service. Recall brings it back.
• The printer button reprints a ticket. With a print bridge it goes to the printer ("… sent to the printer."); without one it opens the browser's print window.
• Nothing to cook right now. when the station is clear.

Staff with the kitchen, bar or service skill can use the Kitchen screen. Everyone else sees "You don't have access to this".

6. Install the kitchen print bridge

The print bridge is a small program that runs on a PC in or near the kitchen. Every few seconds it collects the station's new tickets from Stayantra and prints them on your thermal printer. Nothing else on the PC changes.

What you need

• A Windows 10 or 11 PC (or any Linux computer) that stays on during service, on the same network as the printer if it is a network printer.
• Node.js 18 or newer on that PC. You install it in step B.
• An ESC/POS thermal receipt printer, 58 mm or 80 mm. Epson TM-T82 and TM-T20, Xprinter, Rongta and Sewoo all work.
• The printer's address:
  • Network printer: its IP address, for example 192.168.1.50. Switch the printer on while holding FEED to print a self-test page that shows it. The print port is 9100.
  • USB printer on Windows: its share path, for example \\localhost\KOT. You set it up in step D.
  • USB printer on Linux: /dev/usb/lp0.

A. Add the bridge in Stayantra

Only owners and managers see the Kitchen printers card.

[!WARNING] Keep the token private. Anyone holding it can read this station's tickets. If it leaks, click Remove on the bridge: the token stops working at once.

B. Install Node.js on the kitchen PC (Windows)

1. On the kitchen PC, open nodejs.org and download the LTS version for Windows (the .msi installer).
2. Run the installer and keep every default option. Click Next until Install, then Finish.
3. Check it worked: press the Windows key, type cmd, open Command Prompt, type node -v and press Enter. You should see a version number such as v22.x.x. Anything from v18 up works.

C. Download and unzip the bridge

1. On the kitchen PC, download the print bridge: stayantra-print-bridge.zip.
2. Right-click the downloaded file, choose Extract All…, and type C:\ as the destination. Click Extract.
3. You now have a folder C:\stayantra-print-bridge with six files: README.md, package.json, print-bridge.mjs, escpos.mjs, printer.mjs and config.example.json.

D. Share a USB printer (USB printers only)

Skip this for a network printer.

1. Install the printer's Windows driver from the maker's website, and print a Windows test page to check it works.
2. Open Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners, click the printer, then Printer properties.
3. On the Sharing tab, tick Share this printer and type the share name KOT. Click OK.
4. The printer's address is now \\localhost\KOT. Type it in the bridge's address field in Stayantra (step A), or in config.json below.

A serial printer can use its port instead, for example COM3.

E. Create config.json

1. Open the folder C:\stayantra-print-bridge. Right-click config.example.json and choose Open with → Notepad.
2. You see:

   {
     "STAYANTRA_URL": "https://app.stayantra.com",
     "STAYANTRA_PRINT_TOKEN": "sypb_paste-the-token-from-the-kitchen-printers-screen"
   }

3. Replace sypb_paste-the-token-from-the-kitchen-printers-screen with your token. Keep the quotation marks.
4. Click File → Save As…. Set Save as type to All files (*.*), File name to config.json, and Encoding to UTF-8. Click Save.

The folder must now contain config.json (not config.json.txt). If Windows hides file extensions, turn them on in File Explorer under View → Show → File name extensions.

config.json can also hold these optional settings. You rarely need them, because the printer type and address set in Stayantra are used by default:

For a 58 mm printer, the file looks like this:

{
  "STAYANTRA_URL": "https://app.stayantra.com",
  "STAYANTRA_PRINT_TOKEN": "sypb_your-token-here",
  "PRINTER_COLUMNS": 32
}

F. Run it and test

1. Open Command Prompt and type:

   cd C:\stayantra-print-bridge
   node print-bridge.mjs

2. It prints [print-bridge 1.0.0] polling https://app.stayantra.com every 3s. Leave the window open.
3. In Stayantra, the bridge's row on Kitchen printers turns Online · printer ready within a minute.
4. Fire a test order (see Restaurant and F&B). The ticket prints within a few seconds, and the window says [print-bridge] printed 1 ticket(s).

The bridge's row shows one of:

It also shows last seen and, when the bridge reports a problem, Bridge says: ….

G. Start it automatically with Windows

Closing the Command Prompt window stops the bridge. Make Windows start it by itself, so it survives restarts and power cuts. Use either NSSM or Task Scheduler.

Also set the PC never to sleep: Settings → System → Power (or Power & battery), set When plugged in, put my device to sleep after to Never.

Linux instead of Windows

Install Node.js 18 or newer, unzip the bridge to /opt/stayantra-print-bridge, create config.json there, and add a systemd service. Create /etc/systemd/system/stayantra-print-bridge.service:

[Unit]
Description=Stayantra KOT print bridge
After=network-online.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/opt/stayantra-print-bridge
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /opt/stayantra-print-bridge/print-bridge.mjs
Restart=always
RestartSec=5
User=lp

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then run sudo systemctl enable --now stayantra-print-bridge. The service user needs write access to the USB printer (/dev/usb/lp0), which the lp group has. See its output with journalctl -u stayantra-print-bridge -f.

How the bridge behaves

• Each ticket prints once. If the connection drops between printing and reporting back, the ticket is not printed twice.
• Printer off or out of paper: the ticket is retried, up to 5 times. After the station's alert time, the kitchen, managers and owner are alerted and the ticket shows Not printed on the Kitchen screen.
• Bridge offline: its tickets are handed out again after 45 seconds, so a second bridge for the same station can take over. The card shows Offline after 2 minutes.
• Reprints from the Kitchen screen print with ** REPRINT ** at the top.

Troubleshooting

Still stuck? Open a support ticket with the bridge's name, what the Kitchen printers card says, the printer model and address, and the last lines of the bridge window.