Secondary receipts are those set up to print from a second, separate receipt printer at the time of sale.
The intended use for these is typically kitchen or barista printing, allowing you to print specific transactions or specific transactions containing a pre-set group of products, in order to generate an 'order'.
You can have more than one secondary receipt printer, and each can have its own tag settings that dictate what sales are printed.
Due to technical limitations on Mac and PC that dictate only one printer can be used at a time, Retail POS's secondary receipt function is only supported on iPad.
Here's how to set up a secondary printer:
Set up your printer hardware
Set up your printer hardware according to the manufacturer's instructions. Find a list of supported printers and their setup guides in the Supported hardware article.
Configure the printer for secondary receipts
- Tap the Menu icon (☰) and tap Settings
- Tap Hardware
- Under Receipt printers, select the printer that you wish to print secondary receipts from
- Tap Receipt type
- Select Secondary receipt
Add product tags
A secondary receipt does not have a header or payment details. When printing to a secondary receipt, you can choose only to print items with a certain tag, for example, "coffee" and "tea", or "food".
- Tags are lower-level categories that the product belongs to. Tags are used for product grouping to optimize filtering and searching. These are added to a product when creating or editing a product. Tags can be made up of letters, numbers, and symbols.
- To add tags, navigate to Catalog > Products, select the product tags are to be added to, and click Edit
After you set the receipt type to Secondary receipt, the Print products by tag field will appear. This allows you to specify which product tags will cause a secondary receipt to be generated by the printer only when a product with that tag is included in the sale.
- Tap the Print products by tag toggle button
- A new field called Tags will appear. You can add different product tags and each tag should be separated by a comma.
- Set Cash drawer enabled to Off to prevent triggering the cash drawer for a secondary receipt.
These tags must exactly match the tags you added when you set up your products. You can check these by logging into the Retail POS on Mac or PC, and clicking the products tab. You can then either look at individual products or use the 'tags' tab to see what you've already got set up.
Now, when you make a sale with a tagged product, this receipt printer will generate a receipt as well as your main printer.
Example of product tags
You could tag all your coffee products in a café with "barista" and all the items that need to be sent to the kitchen with "kitchen".
When setting up the printer in the barista area, you'd specify the "barista" tag. When setting up the printer in the kitchen, you'd select the "kitchen" tag.
If 1 x coffee and 1 x eggs on toast is sold, the following receipts will be printed:
- Main printer - a sale receipt with all items, to be given to the customer
- Barista printer - a receipt with only the coffee, so the barista can process the order
- Kitchen printer - a receipt with only the eggs on toast so that the kitchen can prepare it
The following items will be printed on a secondary receipt:
- Invoice number
- Date
- User
- Products, including variants (provided they match the tags specified)
- Discounts
- Line item notes
You can print both a standard receipt and a secondary receipt(s) to the same printer. Just add the same printer twice, and choose standard receipt the first time, and secondary receipt the second time. The printer will then print a full receipt, and the secondary receipt slip on applicable sales.
What's next?
Support hardware
List of supported printers, scanners, cash drawers, and payment terminals.
Learn more