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- Order Time Tracking
Order Time Tracking
Order time tracking that survives contact with a real shift.
Every ticket is timed from fire to bump without anyone pressing a stopwatch. LiveOrder then breaks those times down by item, station, hour, daypart, staff member and channel — so you can see where the minutes actually go.
01/Capture
Measurement nobody has to remember to do.
The reason most restaurants do not have prep-time data is not that they do not want it. It is that every method of collecting it requires someone on the busiest station to do extra work during the busiest hour. That never survives past week two.
LiveOrder records timing as a by-product of using the board. The cook bumps because the food is done — which is a thing they already do — and that bump is the timestamp. There is no separate step, so the data does not degrade when it gets busy. Which is exactly when you need it to be accurate.
What is captured on every ticket
- Fire time — the moment the order reached the kitchen from Clover
- Per-item make time — when each line was marked done
- Per-station dwell — how long the ticket was live at grill, fry, cold, bar, oven, expo
- Total ticket time — fire to final bump, or fire to handover
- Threshold breaches — whether it crossed your warn and late lines, and by how much
- Context — channel, item count, staff member, and how many tickets were open at the time
That last one matters more than people expect. A six-minute average at three open tickets and a six-minute average at fourteen are two different kitchens.
02/Reporting
Averages lie. Distributions do not.
A seven-minute average can mean every ticket takes seven minutes, or that most take four and one in twelve takes twenty. Only one of those loses you guests, and they look identical on a summary line.
Distribution
Median, P90 and the tail
See the middle and the slow end side by side. LiveOrder lists the specific tickets in your worst decile so you can open them and find out what they had in common.
By hour
When you fall behind
Ticket times plotted against volume by fifteen-minute block. The point where the two curves separate is where your staffing or your prep is short.
By item
The slow menu
Average and worst-case make time per item. Useful before you put something on a limited-time promo and discover it takes eleven minutes.
By station
Where the queue forms
Dwell time per station shows whether a slow ticket was slow at the grill or slow sitting at the pass waiting for a side.
By channel
Who is being deprioritized
Compare dine-in against drive-thru, online and third party. Delivery orders quietly sliding to the back of the line is one of the most common findings.
By shift
Team and daypart
Compare shifts, dayparts and days of the week. Same menu, same equipment, different numbers — that is a training conversation with evidence behind it.
03/Live targets
Reports are for Monday. Thresholds are for right now.
Set a warn minute and a late minute per station or per channel. Tickets change color as they age, rise to the top of the board, and — if you want — trigger a manager alert on their phone once something is genuinely stuck.
The point is not to punish anyone. It is that a ticket everyone forgot about becomes visually impossible to ignore before the guest is the one who notices.
Set thresholds per stationThreshold breaches are stored with the ticket, so your late rate is a measured number rather than an impression.
04/Questions
About timing
Where does the clock start and stop?
The clock starts when the order is fired to the kitchen and stops when the last station bumps it. You can also configure it to stop at handover instead, which matters for takeout and delivery pickup.
Does timing work if some stations do not have a screen?
Yes, but you get less detail. With one screen you get whole-ticket times. With a screen per station you also get the dwell time at each one, which is where the useful answers usually are.
Can I compare locations?
Yes. Multi-unit accounts get a rollup that compares average and 90th-percentile ticket times, threshold breach rates and accuracy across every location and daypart.
Can I get the raw data out?
Every report exports to CSV at the ticket level, including fire time, per-station times, channel, station, staff member and any remake attached to it.