Printing your orders
Orders can reach your kitchen three ways: by email, printed automatically on an ordinary A4 printer, or printed as a sticky label for the bag. 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 Pro.
- Label printing — one sticky label per order, printed by itself the moment the order arrives, ready to go straight on the bag. Needs a Star label printer — the TSP143IV-SK or the mC-Label3 — and nothing else: the printer talks to us directly, so there's no computer to keep on. Available 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
A4 printing uses a small helper app, Pekkish Printer, on the computer your printer is attached to. Installing it, signing it in, picking the printer and keeping that computer awake all have their own guide, along with what to do when an A4 printer goes quiet: Setting up A4 auto-print.
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.
What do I sign the printer helper in with?
Your Pekkish login: the email and password you sign in to Pekkish with. There are no separate printer details to lose. Any owner or admin of the shop can sign a helper in with their own, and the printers on that computer then appear for every shop they run.
Forgotten your Pekkish password? Reset it from the sign-in page, then sign the helper in with the new one.
If you're replacing the computer, install the helper on the new one and sign in the same way. Then pick the printer again, because it'll be a new machine as far as we're concerned.
Setting up label printing
Labels come out of a Star label printer (the TSP143IV-SK or the mC-Label3) plugged into your router, with no computer involved. The setup is a different shape from A4 — you visit the printer's own settings page once and give it an address to collect its jobs from — so it has its own guide: Setting up your label printer. It covers which printer to buy and the whole setup from opening the box, including the two steps that catch everyone out (switch on before loading the roll, and save-and-restart at the end).
Common issues
A printer that has gone quiet has its own list: A4 printer problems or label printer problems. These apply whichever way you print:
- 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.