Receipt and ticket printer
Turns a completed order into paper — a guest's receipt at the counter, a production ticket at the bar, or both from the same order.
Two printing mechanisms sit behind almost every unit and they suit opposite environments. A direct-thermal printer runs coated paper past a heated head; there is no ink, it is fast and near-silent, and the mark is a chemical change in the paper itself — which is precisely why heat, steam, sunlight and solvent all erase it. An impact printer strikes a pin through a ribbon onto plain paper, so the mark is deposited pigment: slower, noisy, and indifferent to a hot, greasy, steamy position. The second question is how the printer is addressed. A printer wired to one till lives and dies with that till; a printer on the venue's network can be driven by any terminal and re-routed when one fails, which is what makes multi-station ticket printing possible at all.
- Decide first whether the bar needs paper at all, or only the guest does. That single answer settles the mechanism, the count and the placement, and it is the same decision as the display-versus-paper choice — make it once, for the whole bar, rather than accumulating print points as each station complains.
- Match the mechanism to the position, not to the price at the counter. Thermal belongs at the dry till. An impact printer belongs anywhere a steam wand, a hot pass or a fryer lane will cook the ticket. A thermal ticket left somewhere warm becomes a blank slip, and a blank slip becomes a drink the barista guesses at.
- Standardise on one roll type across every print point in the venue. A bar carrying two roll widths will run out of the wrong one during the rush, and the spare that is sitting under the other till will not fit. Consumables belong on the same par discipline as milk.
- If you run more than one terminal, make sure the printer can be driven by more than one terminal. Otherwise a printer failure takes a till out of service rather than degrading it.
- Look at the cutting mechanism, because that is the part that fails. An automatic cutter is a moving assembly in a paper-dust environment; a manual tear bar cannot jam. Decide which failure you would rather have at peak.
- Confirm roll-change access before the joinery is built. A printer built into a cabinet whose lid cannot open with the counter loaded is a printer that gets its paper changed late — which means it gets changed mid-rush, which is the moment you bought the printer to avoid.
Two distinct positions that are often collapsed into one by accident. The guest receipt belongs at the terminal, at the payment moment. The production ticket belongs at the head of the lane that will make the drink, angled so the barista reads it from the working stance without turning away from the group head — the same reasoning the workflow article applies to every other reach on the bar.
- Specifying thermal for a hot, wet lane because it was the cheaper answer at the dry counter.
- Carrying two roll widths in one venue and discovering it during a rush.
- Treating a thermal receipt as a record. If it must be kept, it must be captured some other way.
- Printing a ticket for every drink on a bar that also runs a screen, which gives the team two sources of truth and guarantees one drink made twice.
- Building the printer into joinery that cannot be opened with the counter in service.
- Buying an automatic cutter for a station where a tear bar would never have failed.
- A small continuous load, but one that must not share a switched socket with anything a member of staff turns off. Which circuit it belongs on is a question for a licensed electrician and the local authority; this site states no amperages.
- The footprint is the unit plus the roll-change swing plus the paper's exit path. A ticket that emerges over a drip tray or into a splash zone is unreadable before anyone picks it up.
- Heat, steam and standing water decide the mechanism, not the budget. Thermal roll stock also degrades in storage if the spares live on a warm shelf near the hot line.
- Direct-thermal receipt printer
- Heated head on coated roll stock; no ribbon, no ink.
- Fast and quiet at a dry counter, and the cheapest to run. The print is not permanent, so treat it as a guest receipt and a short-lived ticket — never as the record of anything you may need to produce later.
- Impact ticket printer
- Pins strike a ribbon onto plain paper, often two-ply.
- Survives a hot, wet, greasy lane where a thermal ticket would come out blank or fade within the shift. The price is noise and speed, and noise on a bar is a real cost, so place it deliberately rather than defaulting to it everywhere.
- Networked print point
- The printer is addressed over the venue network rather than cabled to one terminal.
- Any terminal can drive it, and a failure can be re-routed to another print point while a replacement is sourced. It also means the printer depends on the network being up, which is a different failure to plan for.
- Print goes faint well before the roll ends.
- A dirty or worn thermal head, or roll stock of a different grade to the one the printer was set up for.
- Drinks made from a half-read ticket. The early warning is faintness at the top of the ticket while the bottom is still fine.
- A ticket at the hot lane is blank, curled or brown across its whole face.
- Thermal media in a position that is hot, steamy or in direct sun.
- The wrong drink, made confidently. This is the failure most often blamed on the barista and most often caused by the specification.
- The cutter starts leaving a ragged edge or half-cutting before it jams properly.
- Paper dust in the cutter assembly, or a roll width the mechanism was not set for.
- A till out of service at the moment the queue is longest, and a jam that takes longer to clear than a roll change.
- The roll runs out mid-rush more than once.
- No low-paper discipline at open and no spare held on the station.
- Pure downtime, and it is the cheapest failure on this page to eliminate — the opening procedure already asks for it.