Taking a walk-in order

Somebody is at the counter with a bag. This is the fastest path from that to an order with a reference you can both quote.

The two required fields

Name and phone. Everything else — address, channel, priority, a note about the red wine — can be added later from the order itself.

If the customer has ordered before, start typing and pick them out of the list. You get their address, their history and their tier, and you do not create a second record for the same person.

The order reference

Every order gets a seven-character reference like #T85G8S2. It is on the receipt, in the SMS if you have those switched on, and it is what support will ask you for.

The alphabet has no I, L, O or U in it, so nobody has to ask “one or letter I?” down a phone line, and no reference accidentally spells anything.

If the network is down

Take the order anyway. It gets a reference immediately — one minted on the device, from a range the server never uses, so it cannot collide with anything — and it sends itself when the signal comes back. See Working with no network.