Chit (Ticket)

A chit prints at a station printer or appears on a kitchen display screen within seconds of a server hitting send, and from that point it is the only version of the table the kitchen has. Whatever it says is what gets cooked. Nothing upstream of it, including the guest’s own record, reaches the line on its own.

How does an allergy on a guest profile get onto the chit?

Only by a person typing it into the order. A chit carries what was rung in and nothing else, so an allergy sitting on a guest profile, a tag applied by the marketing team, or a note in the reservation book is invisible on the line until a server enters it as a modifier or an order note. No system writes onto the ticket by itself.

The chit is one of only two channels by which guest information reaches the kitchen at all. The other is the pre-shift briefing. Everything else stops at the pass, and this is the one guest-data failure with a safety consequence rather than a marketing one: a shellfish allergy recorded perfectly in three systems still reaches nobody holding a pan.

So a guest record has to arrive in front of the server before the order is taken, not merely exist somewhere. A restaurant CRM’s contribution is upstream of the ticket. Loyalist writes guest notes and tags back into Resy and OpenTable, so the allergy shows up on the booking the host and the server already have open, and pre-shift reporting puts the same information in front of the kitchen before doors.

What is the difference between a chit and a check?

A chit is an instruction to the kitchen and a check is a bill for the guest. Both come out of the same order in the point of sale, and they carry different things: the chit carries coursing, modifiers, and fire timing, while the check carries prices, discounts, comps, and the payment.

The two also have different lifespans. A chit is spiked or cleared at the end of the shift and nobody reads it again. The check persists, and it is the record a restaurant CRM reconciles against a reservation to work out which guest ate what. Kitchen tickets are almost never available for analysis after the fact, so the item-level history a group can report on comes from the check side.

Can my POS put guest notes on the kitchen ticket?

In most systems yes, in two places: as a modifier attached to a single item, and as a note attached to the order or the seat. Which one gets used matters. Item-level modifiers travel with the item to the station cooking it, while an order-level note may route only to the expo printer, so an allergy typed into the wrong field can print somewhere the cook on saute never sees it. Point-of-sale systems differ in what they support, and printer routing is configured venue by venue, so it is worth confirming where an allergy note actually lands.