Drive-thru timing without drilling a loop into your lane.

Time every car through order, prep, ready and handoff using data your Clover POS already produces. Live goals on the kitchen board, stage-level breakdowns afterwards, and no sensors, controller boxes or installers.

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01/The stages

A lane time is four numbers, not one.

"Our drive-thru is slow" is not actionable. Knowing that your order-to-prep gap is fine but your ready-to-handoff gap doubles after 6pm tells you to move a person to the window, not to buy a faster fryer.

Order taken

The clock starts when the order is committed on the Clover terminal at the speaker or window. Everything after this is measured against it.

In the kitchen

The ticket appears on the drive-thru profile of the kitchen board, flagged by channel so it is never treated as a walk-in that can wait.

Ready

The last station bumps and the order moves to ready. The gap between fire and ready is your true kitchen time for that car.

Handed over

One tap at the window closes the car out. The gap between ready and handoff is the number most operators have never measured, and it is frequently the biggest one.

02/On the board

The current car, against the goal, where the team can see it.

A drive-thru crew works to whatever number is in front of them. If nothing is in front of them, they work to a feeling. LiveOrder puts the live figure on the kitchen board and, if you want it, on a small window screen:

Current car — elapsed time, colored against your target
Cars in progress — how many drive-thru tickets are open right now
Rolling average — the last ten cars, so a single anomaly does not swing it
Shift-to-date — average and count against the daypart goal

Targets are set per daypart, because a nine-car breakfast rush and a forty-car dinner rush should not be judged by the same line.

What it will not do

LiveOrder measures from the moment an order is entered. It does not know how long a car sat in the queue before reaching the speaker, because nothing in the POS knows that — only a physical sensor does. If total queue time is a franchise reporting requirement, keep the hardware timer and use LiveOrder for the stages inside it, which is where the fixable time lives.

We would rather tell you that up front than let you find out after you have cancelled a hardware contract.

Order → Prep

How fast the kitchen picks the ticket up once it fires.

Prep → Ready

Real make time for drive-thru orders specifically, not blended with dine-in.

Ready → Handoff

The window gap. Usually the largest and least measured stage in the lane.

Total

Order to handoff per car, per daypart, per lane, per shift.

03/Afterwards

Reports that name the fifteen minutes that hurt you.

Drive-thru performance is rarely uniformly bad. It falls apart in specific windows — the shift change at 4pm, the second Friday car stack, the twenty minutes after a delivery arrives and someone leaves the window to sign for it.

LiveOrder plots car times by fifteen-minute block against volume, so those windows stop being folklore. Every report exports to CSV for franchisor reporting or an area manager review.

All timing reports

Drive-thru · liveGoal 3:30 · last 10 avg 3:12

04/Questions

About drive-thru timing

Do I need loop sensors or a timer board installed?

No. LiveOrder times the drive-thru from events that already exist in your Clover order flow plus one tap at the window. There is no lane loop, no sensor, no controller box and no installer visit.

How accurate is it compared to a hardware lane timer?

Hardware timers measure vehicle presence; LiveOrder measures order progress. For the stages you can act on — order to prep, prep to ready, ready to handoff — they track closely. What LiveOrder does not measure is time spent in the queue before a car reaches the speaker.

Can I set a goal time?

Yes. Set a target per daypart, and the board shows the current car against it in real time plus a running average for the shift.

Does it work with two lanes or a pull-forward spot?

Yes. Lanes are configured separately so their times do not blend, and a pull-forward or park spot is tracked as its own stage rather than being dropped from the total.