Counter service mode | Tavvi Guides

Before you start: A food or drink business. Cafes already run counter-style out of the box, this guide is mostly for restaurant setups going mobile, seasonal, or counter-only.

Two shapes of food service

Table service opens a check on a table and collects after the meal. Counter service is the opposite physics: Food trucks, stalls & counters, pay first, orders tracked by number Customer orders, pays on the spot, gets a number, food comes up, number gets called. No floor plan on wheels, no open tabs at a festival stall.

The app ships both shapes and one switch between them.

Flip the switch

Open Settings → store operations and find Service model.
Two options: Table service and Counter service. Pick counter.
One guard can stop you: "Close open checks first", "Open table checks must be closed and paid before switching to counter service." Settle any running tables first; money in flight doesn't switch modes.
The change is live immediately. No reinstall, no re-setup, no lost catalog.

What changes on your screen

Gone: Floor Plan and Open Checks, the table world.
Here instead: Active Orders (Orders currently in progress.), the number-queue world. Every order carries an Order Number from the moment it's paid.
The register pays FIRST. Ring the order, take payment (the tip step rides along), and the order enters the queue.
Kitchen still works the same, tickets land on your kitchen printer or display with the order number on them, and cooks bump them through exactly as the kitchen-display guide describes.

The service rhythm

Order → pay → "you're number 47" → prep → mark it ready → hand it over. The customer-facing half is honest too: an online or pickup customer sees Ready for pickup! the moment you advance the order. The whole day is a queue you drain, not a room you manage.

Good to know: Food trucks: flip to counter mode once, and the setting travels with your store account, every device signed into the store sees the same counter POS. Nothing to redo per device or per event.

If something's off

No Service model row in Settings. The switch lives on food/drink (specialty) setups. Retail and service businesses have their own flows and don't carry it.
The switch refuses with open checks. That's the guard doing its job, close and collect every open table, then flip.
You flipped and miss your tables. Flip back the same way. Same guard in reverse applies to nothing, tables return, floor plan intact, no data lost.