Printers and cash drawers at a restaurant till

What Achekam's till does and does not drive at a restaurant: receipt printers, kitchen printers and cash drawers, and how to run service without them.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Hospitality businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

A restaurant owner choosing a till usually pictures the whole counter: the screen, a receipt printer that spits out the bill, a docket printer that chirps in the kitchen when table seven orders, and a cash drawer that springs open at the end of each sale. Before spending money on any of that hardware, it pays to know which parts the till software will actually talk to.

For Achekam's till the answer is short, and it is better to hear it before opening night than after. This article explains what the till does not drive, what it does give you, and how a restaurant, bar or hotel dining room in South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya can run a smooth service around it.

No device bridge: what that means at the pass

Achekam's till does not drive card terminals, receipt printers, cash drawers, scales or a customer display. There is no device bridge between the till in the browser and the hardware on the counter, so nothing on the counter is triggered by a sale.

In practice:

• the card machine works on its own, and the cashier records a card payment at the till from the bank terminal's slip;
• a receipt does not print by itself when a sale is completed;
• the kitchen gets no printed docket from the till;
• the cash drawer does not open when a cash sale is rung up.

None of this stops service. It changes who presses which button, and it is worth deciding those habits before the first busy Friday rather than during it.

Receipts as PDFs: print, download or e-mail

What the till does produce is a proper receipt. The till receipt is a PDF made by the server from the posted sale, showing every payment, VAT by rate and the business's tax number, and it can be printed, downloaded or e-mailed to the customer.

Because the receipt is made from the posted sale, it always agrees with the books. A guest who asks for a receipt for their company's expense claim can have it e-mailed straight from the sale, which many diners now prefer to paper.

If you want paper at the table, print the PDF to a printer the till computer can use, in the same way you would print any other document. One caution: the paper-size, logo and footer options on the receipt screen change only an on-screen mock-up, not the receipt itself. Test how the real receipt PDF prints on the printer you have in mind before you buy a stack of narrow paper rolls.

In South Africa, the Consumer Protection Act requires a written record of each transaction, and section 26 on sales records sets out what that receipt must contain. Nigerian and Kenyan restaurants should check their own rules, including any tax invoice requirements.

Getting orders to the kitchen without a kitchen printer

The till does not send orders to the kitchen. The restaurant table and kitchen screens in the Commerce area store nothing, and their screens say so. So the order has to reach the pass some other way.

Three approaches that work:

1. Docket books. Waiters write each order in a duplicate book, one copy to the kitchen, one kept for the bill. It is old-fashioned and dependable, and the kitchen works from paper it can spike.
2. A separate kitchen system you already own. If you run a kitchen display or ordering app, keep it for the kitchen, and ring the bill up at the till when the table pays.
3. Spoken orders at small venues. A coffee shop with one cook can call orders, provided the bill is rung up as the order is taken.

Whichever you choose, keep the bill on the till while the table is still eating. A sale can be parked on the server, picked up once by any of the business's tills, or dropped with a reason. Park the table's bill as items are ordered, and pick it up when the guests ask for the bill. How parked sales work for bar tabs is covered in bar tabs and parked sales.

Cash drawers and the cash-up count

A drawer that does not spring open on a sale needs a different routine. Use a drawer that opens with a key or a manual release, keep the key with the cashier on shift, and open it only to take or give cash for a sale already rung up.

At the end of the shift, the till does the arithmetic. At cash-up the cashier counts the drawer by notes and coins, and the server works out the expected cash, records the difference and posts it to cash over and short. Notes and coins are listed for rand, shilling and naira. A live X report of an open till and a Z report frozen at cash-up can be opened as PDFs, so a manager can check mid-shift whether the drawer is on track.

Because the cashier is whoever is signed in, a drawer shared by several waiters on one login makes that difference impossible to trace; why every waiter needs their own till login explains why.

What to check before buying hardware

Hardware sellers often bundle a printer-driven cash drawer with a receipt printer. Without a device bridge, that drawer may never open by itself, so a simple manual drawer can be the better buy.

Before opening night

Run a mock service with your actual equipment: take an order, get it to the kitchen, park the bill, take a card payment from the terminal, print and e-mail the receipt, and cash up. Fix whatever trips you up while the dining room is still empty.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.