Scheduled orders, the Zayos guide to future tickets
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
A scheduled order is an order placed now for a fixed time later. The software job is not taking it, it is firing it: promise time minus travel time minus packing minus cook time, held in a queue the kitchen sees only when the clock says go.
Why is a future order harder than a live one?
Two orders arrive at 10:02 on a Tuesday. One is lunch, now. The other is lunch on Thursday at 12:30 for eight people. The first is a kitchen problem and your kitchen already knows how to solve it. The second is a calendar problem, and most ordering software treats the two identically. That is the whole story of why scheduled orders go wrong.
A scheduled order, also called order ahead, a pre-order or a future order, is an order paid for now and promised for a specific time later, anywhere from twenty minutes out to several weeks out.
Restaurants want this capability for obvious reasons. Office lunches, school pickups, catering, holidays, and the customer who books a Friday dinner on Wednesday because Friday is the night they never have time. It is also some of the highest ticket, lowest chaos revenue a kitchen can take, because you know about it before service starts. But only if the software holds the order correctly until the moment it matters.
What actually breaks when a restaurant takes orders for later?
Six failures, in roughly the order operators hit them. None of them are exotic. Every one of them is a scheduling feature that was built as a checkbox instead of a workflow.
The ticket that printed three days early
An order comes in Tuesday morning for Friday at noon. The printer fires it Tuesday morning. It gets clipped to the rail with everything else, a cook makes it, and on Friday nobody can find it. This is the single most common failure, and it happens because the system treated a promise time as an arrival time.
The ticket that never printed at all
The opposite failure. The order lands in a Scheduled tab that nobody has clicked since the demo. The first person to learn about it is the customer standing at the counter at 12:30 asking for eight kebab platters. A scheduled queue that lives on a different screen from the live queue will be forgotten by the second week.
The promise time that forgot the drive
A delivery is promised for 12:30. The kitchen fires at 12:25 because that is what the ticket said. The driver still has fourteen minutes of traffic. Food arrives at 12:44, cold, and the review says so. Promise time and fire time are two different numbers, and only one of them belongs on the kitchen screen.
The item that was sold three days ago
Somebody orders Friday whole lamb on Tuesday. On Wednesday the special changes, the item comes off the menu, and nothing reconciles the order that was already paid for. Any platform that lets people buy the future has to tell you what the future has already been sold.
The noon wall
Forty office orders, every one of them promised for 12:00 because 12:00 was the default. A two person line plates roughly twelve tickets in a fifteen minute window. The other twenty eight are late before the day starts, and none of them are late because the kitchen was slow.
The holiday clipboard
Every restaurant that has ever taken Thanksgiving, Eid or Christmas pre orders has taken them on paper by the register. One copy, one handwriting, no backup, and the deposit rules living in somebody head. That clipboard is a scheduled ordering system with no redundancy, and it is the one week of the year you cannot afford to lose it.
How do you work out when to fire a scheduled order?
Work backwards from the promise, never forwards from the order. One delivery ticket, promised for 12:30, with a branzino on it:
| Promise time | 12:30 pm |
| minus drive time | 12 min |
| minus pack and hand off | 3 min |
| minus longest cook on the ticket | 9 min |
| fire at | 12:06 pm |
Fire time equals promise time minus travel time minus packing time minus the longest cook time on the ticket. Every scheduled ordering system either computes that for you, or quietly hands the arithmetic to a line cook in the middle of a rush.
Note which number moved: the cook time is per item, not per restaurant. Nine minutes for a branzino, six for a wrap, ninety plus a staging table for a forty person tray. A platform with one global prep time will make you pick a number that is wrong for most of your menu.
How far ahead should you let people order?
- Minimum lead time
- Set a floor so nothing lands inside the queue you are already cooking. Fifteen to twenty minutes for pickup, thirty five to forty five for delivery is a normal starting point. Without a floor, "schedule for 12:05" at 12:03 is just a regular order wearing a costume.
- Maximum horizon
- Seven days is plenty for the regular menu. Catering and large party orders want fourteen to thirty. Past that you are quoting a price you may not want to honor, and you should be taking a deposit and confirming by phone rather than letting a stranger buy November in July.
- Per item lead times
- This is the rule most platforms get wrong. A chicken wrap needs six minutes. A whole branzino needs twenty five. A forty person tray needs twelve hours and a staging table. If the software has one global lead time, you will either block your fastest items or oversell your slowest. There is no setting that fixes both.
- Closures the calendar knows about
- The scheduler has to read the same hours calendar the storefront reads, including the Monday you close for a private event and the two weeks in August you shut down. A system that will sell a Tuesday you are closed is worse than no scheduling at all, because the customer already paid.
- Time zones and daylight saving
- An order placed before a clock change should fire at the wall clock time the customer read on the confirmation, not an hour off. This sounds like a detail until the second Sunday in March, when a restaurant with fifty pre orders finds out which side of it their platform is on.
How do you stop every pre-order landing at 11:45?
Cap the slots. Cut the service into fifteen minute buckets and give each bucket a ticket limit based on what your line actually plates in fifteen minutes, not what it plates on a good day. Leave headroom, because marketplace orders and walk ins arrive with no warning and do not respect your buckets.
If a two person line plates twelve tickets in a quarter hour, cap scheduled orders at roughly eight per slot and let the software grey out 12:00 once it is full.
Diners pick 12:15 without complaining, every time, as long as they can see that 12:00 is gone. What they will not forgive is a promise you took and then missed. This is the same discipline a restaurant already applies to a reservation book, moved to the takeout side of the house.
The second half of pacing happens the night before. A scheduled queue that prints as a mise en place sheet at close, showing tomorrow tickets in fire order with quantities rolled up, is worth more to a chef than any dashboard. It is also the cheapest insurance against the two failures at the top of this page: nothing printed early, nothing forgotten.
What should you demand from scheduled ordering software?
Ask for a live demo of each of these against your own menu, not a slide. Ask us the same questions.
- 01 Fire time computed from prep time, shown on the kitchen screen as a countdown, never just the promise time.
- 02 Per item lead times, so a twelve hour tray and a six minute wrap can live on the same menu.
- 03 Capacity caps per time slot, set by daypart, so a full 12:00 greys out and pushes the next order to 12:15.
- 04 The scheduled queue visible on the same screen as live tickets, not a separate tab.
- 05 An hours calendar with holiday and one off closures that the scheduler actually obeys.
- 06 Card authorized at checkout with a clear rule for when it is captured, especially on orders placed weeks out.
- 07 Change and cancel windows you control, so nobody cancels a forty person order at 11:50.
- 08 A printable prep sheet for tomorrow, generated at close tonight. This is the feature operators use every single day and almost nobody demos.
How does Zayos handle scheduled and future orders?
Scheduled orders run on the same branded ordering site as everything else, on your own domain. A diner picks a day and a time at checkout, pays with a saved card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and the ticket is held until it is due. Menu, photos, modifiers, hours and scheduling all publish from one place, so the hours you set are the hours the scheduler obeys.
Scheduled tickets land on the same kitchen tablet as your live direct orders and, on Operator plus Marketplace, your Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub tickets ingested through Otter. One queue, one expediter view, one 86 flow. That is the part that keeps future orders from disappearing: there is no second screen for them to hide on.
The large end of this is catering, which gets its own builder plus group ordering where each person on an office order picks their own item. The catering service fee is 10%, paid by the customer at checkout, never by the restaurant.
Zayos is $499 per location per month for Operator, $599 for Operator plus Marketplace, and $699 for Concierge. Month to month, no setup fee, no commission. Scheduling is not an add-on. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and tips, and the diner pays $0.99 on pickup, $2.99 on delivery, nothing on dine in.
Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach is live on Zayos and taking orders today. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke and Yalla Market. Most operators go live in under two weeks and take a first direct order within a week. See how it works, the full pricing page, or the wider online ordering system this sits inside.
Scheduled orders, answered
What is the difference between a scheduled order and a pre-order?
How far in advance should a restaurant let people order?
Do customers pay when they schedule the order or when they pick it up?
How do I stop scheduled orders from burying the lunch rush?
Can scheduled orders from DoorDash and Uber Eats land on the same screen?
Does Zayos charge extra for scheduled ordering?
See what the apps are costing you.
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