Managing Your Kitchen Flow: The Order Control Center 🛑🍔

When your kitchen gets slammed during a Friday night rush, managing the influx of digital tickets is critical to maintaining smooth operations. NX Restaurant includes an Order Control Center accessible from both the NX POS terminal and the NX Portal. This feature allows managers to temporarily pause specific ordering surfaces—like your direct online ordering site or third-party delivery integrations (DoorDash, UberEats, etc.)—giving your kitchen team a chance to catch up.

🔐 Required Permissions

Because pausing your revenue channels has a major impact on business operations, this feature is strictly secured. Employees must have the Manage Order Control Center claim assigned to their user profile or Job Code to access this dashboard on either platform.

💻 Method 1: Managing from the NX Portal (Back Office)

If you are managing the restaurant from the back office or a laptop, you can control your surfaces globally:

1. Log in to the NX Portal and navigate to Orders > Order Control Center.

2. Review your active channels, split into two main sections:

   • Online Ordering: Your custom direct subdomains (e.g., your online ordering URL or E-Gift portal).

   • DSP Integrations: Third-party Delivery Service Providers (e.g., DoorDash).

3. Tap the Pause button next to the channel you want to stop.

Setting an Auto-Resume Timer

When you tap pause, a configuration window will appear. NX allows you to choose exactly when your store should automatically go live again, preventing you from forgetting to turn your channels back on:

• Quick Intervals: Select a quick timer (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours).

• Rest of Day: Keep the channel closed until the next business day.

• Manual Control: Select "Until I resume manually" if you want full control.

• Custom Time: Pick a specific hour on the clock using the time picker.

• Reason Tagging: Enter an optional reason (e.g., "Kitchen backed up" or "Out of packaging material") for your historical manager logs.

📱 Method 2: Managing from the NX POS 

If you are actively on the floor, floor managers can toggle channels instantly from any active POS station without needing to log into the web portal:

1. Tap the sidebar menu and navigate to Manager Menu > Online Order.

2. A window will display your active DSP Integrations and Online Ordering surfaces side-by-side.

3. Tap Pause next to an individual channel, or tap the large red Pause All button at the bottom to freeze all digital incoming orders immediately.

4. Select your auto-resume interval and reason on the pop-up modal, then tap the red Pause confirmation button.

🚦 Monitoring Channel Statuses

Once a channel is successfully paused, its status indicator will switch from a green Active badge to an orange Paused badge across all devices. The dashboard will also display a live countdown showing exactly how much time is left before the channel automatically turns back on.

Need Help? 💡

The 'Pause' buttons are greyed out or showing a lock badge on my terminal.

Your account lacks the Manage Order Control Center permission claim. Reach out to your General Manager to have this permission applied to your role in the portal under Labor > Job Groups.

If I pause DoorDash in NX, do I still need to log into my DoorDash tablet?

No! The NX integration communicates directly with the DSP servers. Pausing DoorDash inside NX tells their system to automatically mark your store as temporarily paused on their customer-facing app.

What happens to guests who are actively building a cart when I hit pause?

Guests who are in the middle of browsing your menu will receive a friendly notification at checkout stating that the restaurant is temporarily maintaining its kitchen volume and cannot accept new orders at this moment.

Still having trouble balancing your kitchen traffic?

Reach out to your NX  Partner for great tips on managing kitchen flow with NX!