Your first bill in five steps

Only three things stand between you and a sale

A new account already has a kitchen and a register in it — both are created for you when you sign up. Three things are genuinely required before a bill can be rung, and everything else on any checklist can wait until after your first sale:

• a register (created at signup),
• at least one item you can sell,
• an open till session.

The steps below are in that order because that is the order the till enforces. Working a checklist from the top and doing the easy rows first is how owners finish four of five and still cannot ring a sale.

Step 1 — Check the register is there

Open the till. If it lets you start an order, your register exists and you can go to step 2.

If something says there is no register, that is not work you were supposed to do — it means provisioning did not finish when the account was created. No amount of menu work will help. Send it to Support and we will fix the account.

Step 2 — Get your menu in

An order will open on an empty menu — but there is nothing to put on it, and a bill cannot be printed until at least one active sellable item exists. "Add an item" is one step for a tea stall and an evening's work for a two-hundred-dish menu, so pick the fastest route you have:

• Photograph the printed menu. Point the camera at your card or board and let the menu import read the dishes off it. Fastest for most kitchens.
• Import a file. If your old system can export a list, this is the exact route — and the only one that can also bring in your customers, your stock list and last year's sales.
• Photograph the old system's item list. A screenshot or a photo of the screen works the same way as a menu photo.
• Type it in. For a short menu this is often quicker than anything else.

You do not need the whole menu today. One item is enough to ring the first bill, and the rest can arrive tomorrow.

Step 3 — Open the till for the day

The till asks for an opening session before it will take an order — that is what ties a day's sales and cash to a person and a shift. Open it once at the start of trading. Everything from then on lands inside that session, and the day-end close reads from it.

Step 4 — Ring the order

Add the item, send it to the kitchen if you want a ticket, and the check builds as you go. Nothing here needs a printer: printing is a setting on each device and can stay off. The order is saved on the till whether or not paper comes out, and it is saved whether or not the link is up.

Step 5 — Take the payment

Settle the check with cash, a card or UPI. That settle is the moment the sale becomes real: it takes the next bill number in your series, prints if this device prints, and lands on your day's totals.

That is the first bill. What the document itself says depends on the registration type on your business profile, and there are three: a regular GST-registered business gets a tax invoice; a business on the composition scheme is GST-registered but does not collect GST, so it gets a bill of supply; a business that is not registered also gets a bill of supply. Setup asks you for it, and an account that has never been asked starts as regular — so if that is not you, set it on the business profile before you print anything for a customer.

What you do not need first

Each of these has a working default, so none of them can stop a sale:

• A bill-number series — created the first time a number is claimed.
• A tax rate on an item — an item with none is billed at zero per cent rather than refusing.
• A printer — printing is per device, defaults to off, and can be set up any time.
• Table plans, dine-in or delivery settings, units, a UPI handle, your team — all real, none of them a blocker.

What to set up soon after

These do not block trading, and they are the ones that quietly cost you later. The setup list in the back office keeps them in front of you, each with the consequence of leaving it undone rather than the name of the empty field:

• your registration details, so invoices carry the number they are supposed to,
• printer routing, so tickets reach the right station instead of nowhere,
• how you take payment, so the money has somewhere to land,
• your devices, so you know which machine is the till and which one holds the bill numbers.