Takeaway and delivery orders without mistakes: a guide for restaurants

Takeaway and delivery orders go wrong in a few familiar ways. The kitchen plates a takeaway order for the dining room. The extra shito is forgotten. The rider leaves with the wrong bag, or comes back with less cash than the orders added up to. A WhatsApp order is accepted, nobody rings it in, and the customer calls back an hour later.

Most of these mistakes happen before the food is cooked, at the moment the order is taken. Get that right and the rest follows.

Ring every order in first

Every takeaway and delivery order should go into the till before the kitchen starts cooking it, the same as a table order. If the kitchen only cooks from tickets, there is no such thing as an order that was cooked but never charged.

This applies to every channel: the counter, a phone call, a WhatsApp message and an order from your online menu. The person who takes the order rings it in and sends it to the kitchen straight away.

Mark how the order leaves

Each order needs a clear type: dine-in, takeaway or delivery. The type should print on the kitchen ticket and show on the kitchen screen, so the cook packs takeaway food in packs and not on plates, and the person at the pass knows which orders wait for a rider.

Add the notes to the right dish, not to the order as a whole: "no pepper" on the waakye, "extra gari" on the beans. A note that says "one without pepper" for an order of three plates is a guess waiting to go wrong.

1. 1Take the order and ring it in as takeaway or delivery
2. 2Add name, phone, address and notes to each dish
3. 3Kitchen cooks and packs from the ticket
4. 4Check the bag against the ticket and seal it
5. 5Hand over with the receipt and record who took it
6. 6Settle the payment with the rider when they return

Charge for packs and delivery

Packs, bags and the delivery fee are real costs, so make them items on your menu and add them to every order that needs them. Then they are charged every time and you can see in your sales report how much you collect.

Example: what a delivery order should show

• Within 3 km64 orders
• 3 to 6 km31 orders
• Over 6 km9 orders

Source: Example figures

Set delivery fees by distance or by area, and write them down so every staff member quotes the same price. If one area brings very few orders and a long ride, it may not be worth delivering there.

Check the bag before it leaves

The cheapest check in any restaurant is the person at the pass reading the ticket against the bag. Count the packs, check the notes, add the sachet water or drink, and staple the receipt or ticket to the bag. If two orders go out together, label each bag with the customer's name.

This one habit catches most of the complaints you would otherwise hear an hour later on the phone, after the food has gone cold and the rider is across town.

Keep riders' money straight

Delivery money is safest when it is settled after every run, not at the end of the night. Three things help:

• Know how each order is paid before it leaves. Paid already by MoMo, cash on delivery, or MoMo on delivery.
• Record every MoMo transaction ID. If the customer pays by MoMo at the door, they send it to the business wallet, not the rider's own number, and the ID goes against that order.
• Count the rider's cash against the orders. If a rider took three cash orders worth GH₵149, GH₵88 and GH₵62, they should bring back GH₵299, less any change you gave them as a float.

A short list on paper or in the till of which rider took which orders makes the evening count a two-minute job. Read how to reconcile Mobile Money payments for the end-of-day check.

What about delivery apps?

If you also sell through a food delivery app, treat those orders as delivery orders in your own till too. Ring each one in when it arrives, and record the payment under its own payment type, for example "Delivery app", so your reports show how much came that way. Match those totals with what the app pays you.

MPOS does not connect to delivery apps, so these orders are rung in by hand. That takes a minute, and it keeps every order going through the same kitchen ticket and the same reports.

How does MPOS help with takeaway and delivery?

MPOS has dine-in, takeaway and delivery orders, with notes on each item, a kitchen screen and kitchen tickets, and separate printers for the kitchen and the bar. Your restaurant gets a public page with a QR menu and WhatsApp ordering, so customers send orders from your real menu with real prices. Payments can be cash, MoMo with its transaction ID, card, on credit, custom payment types or split, and receipts go by WhatsApp or print on a thermal printer. If the network goes off, the till keeps taking orders and syncs later: see keep selling when the network goes off.

For how WhatsApp orders fit a busy dining room, read running a busy chop bar. For everything else, the complete guide to running a restaurant in Ghana. You can start a free trial with your own menu.