Printing your orders
Orders can reach your kitchen three ways: by email, printed automatically on an ordinary A4 printer, or printed as sticky labels for each item. You pick the one that suits you, and you can keep the email as a safety net alongside it.
Where to find it
Everything to do with printing lives on one page. In your shop admin, click Printing. It has two tabs:
- Print jobs — what has printed, when, and what went wrong. This is where you check on a quiet printer or send an order out again.
- Setup — how orders reach you, where the emails go, and your printer settings.
Which route do I want?
- Email — every order lands in an inbox. Free on every plan. Fine while you're finding your feet, but someone has to be watching a screen during service.
- A4 auto-print — a full order sheet prints itself the moment an order comes in, on a normal office printer. Needs a PC or Mac in the shop that stays switched on. Available on Starter and above.
- Label printing — one sticky label per item, ready to go straight on the food. Coming soon on Pro.
Most shops that print end up wanting the printout, not the email — during a lunch rush nobody has a spare hand for a laptop.
Choosing your route
On the Setup tab, pick one route under How orders reach you. That choice matters for more than where the paper comes out: it's what tells us an order has actually reached the kitchen. If your chosen printer stops working, you'll see it, because orders will stop being marked as printed.
Underneath there's Also email me every order. Leave it ticked and a copy lands in your inbox whatever happens, so a jammed printer never loses an order. It deliberately doesn't mark orders as printed — only your chosen route does that, so a broken printer can't hide behind the email still arriving.
Where the order emails go
Also on the Setup tab. By default we email whoever set the shop up, which is usually the wrong person — a login isn't a kitchen address. Put one address per line and we'll email them all.
Use Send a test afterwards. It's the only way to know an address really works, and if we've ever had an email bounce back from one of them we'll warn you on that page.
Setting up A4 auto-print
This uses PrintNode, a small helper app that sits on the computer your printer is attached to and listens for jobs from us. You don't need a PrintNode account of your own — we create one for you.
1. Create your print account
On the Setup tab, under A4 auto-print, click Create print account. This takes a second and sets up everything behind the scenes.
2. Install the helper
The page will offer you a Mac and a Windows installer. Download the right one and run it on the computer your printer is plugged into — not on your phone or a laptop you take home. That computer needs to be on and connected to the internet whenever you're taking orders.
3. Sign the helper in
The first time you open the helper it asks for an email address and password. These are not your Pekkish login. They're a separate set of details we generate just for the printer, and you'll find them on the Setup tab underneath the installer buttons.
Copy them across exactly. The password is shown in three blocks to make it easier to type, and the dashes are part of it.
4. Choose your printer
Once the helper is running it reports back which printers it can see. Return to the Setup tab and pick the computer first, then the printer attached to it — handy if you've got a till PC and an office PC. If nothing has appeared yet, give it a few seconds and click Refresh list; the helper has to check in with us first.
Check the computer shows as connected. If it says disconnected, the helper isn't running on that machine. Printers that can't take A4 paper are listed but greyed out, so you can't pick one by mistake.
5. Send a test print
Click Test print. A single sheet should come out saying your shop name and the time. If it does, you're finished — real orders will print by themselves from now on.
Checking on your printing
The Print jobs tab lists every print we've attempted, newest first, with what happened to each one. It updates on its own while you've got it open, so you can watch an order go out.
If anything has failed or gone quiet in the last week you'll see a warning at the top, and Problems only filters the list down to those. Every row has a Reprint button — if a sheet jams or comes out badly, send it again from there rather than asking the customer to reorder. Press it twice by accident and we'll ignore the second one.
Orders we never saw printed are tidied up overnight so they don't pile up, and they're marked as closed rather than printed — we won't tell you something came out when nobody confirmed it did.
I've lost the printer sign-in details
Nothing is lost, and you don't need to reset anything. Sign in to Pekkish, go to Printing and open the Setup tab — the email address and password are shown there. They don't change and they don't expire, so you can set the helper up again on a new till PC whenever you need to.
If you're replacing the computer, just install the helper on the new one and sign in with the same details. Then pick the printer again, because it'll be a new machine as far as we're concerned.
Label printing — coming soon
Sticky labels, one per item, printed on a Star mC-Label3 and ready to go straight on the food. We're finishing this off and will document the setup here once it's ready. If it's something you want, tell us — it helps us prioritise.
Common issues
- Nothing prints, and nothing says why — check the till computer is switched on, awake and online. A sleeping computer is the usual culprit; it's worth turning off sleep mode on that machine.
- My printer isn't in the list — the helper needs to be running on the computer the printer is attached to. Open it, check it's signed in, then click Refresh list on the Setup tab.
- The helper won't accept my password — you may be using your Pekkish login. The helper needs the separate details shown on the Setup tab.
- It printed earlier and stopped — open the Print jobs tab. It'll show the last error we saw. Most often it's the computer having gone to sleep or the printer being out of paper.
- An order printed badly — hit Reprint on the Print jobs tab, or open the order and print it again from there.
- I switched printer mid-service — we'll ask whether to send anything still waiting to the new one. Say yes and it goes straight out.
Do I still get the emails?
Yes, as long as Also email me every order is ticked. Many shops keep it on as a safety net — if a printer jams mid-service, the order is still sitting in the inbox and nobody has to go hunting for it.
Stuck on something? Contact support.