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What a missed ticket costs, in your own numbers

We will not tell you what a missed ticket costs your kitchen, because we have not measured your kitchen. Here is how to work the figure out yourself.

Published 2026-08-20 by MiniRestaurants.

A rail of tickets with one position empty, and a seven-day tally beneath it A schematic. Six plain rounded rectangles sit in a row, standing for tickets on a rail. The third position is empty and drawn as an outline in the accent colour, marked MISSED: the ticket that is not there. Below the rail, five tally strokes stand for the count the post asks the reader to keep — a docket clipped by the pass, one mark every time a ticket is missed, remade or walked back, for seven days. No cost figure appears, because the number belongs to the reader's kitchen and not to us.

Why there is no number in this post

The usual version of this article opens with a figure. A missed ticket costs some specific amount, the sentence runs, and everything after it is arithmetic on a number nobody in the room can trace.

We do not have that number. We have not measured your kitchen, we have not measured anybody's kitchen, and an industry average we cannot open and read is not evidence, it is a rumour with a decimal point. So this post contains no figure for what a missed ticket costs, and any vendor who hands you one should be asked where they measured it and on how many kitchens.

What we can do is tell you exactly which numbers make up the answer, all of which you already have.

The numbers only you have

The cost of a missed ticket in your kitchen is built from four things, and you own all four. What the plate was sold for. What the ingredients on it cost you, which is the part you actually lose when it goes in the bin. The wage cost of the time spent making it twice. And the value of the guest who watched it happen, which is the largest of the four and the only one you have to estimate.

Multiply that by how often it happens. Not how often you think it happens, how often it happened last week, which is a thing you can count on the back of a docket for seven days before you decide anything.

Seven days of counting is worth more than any published average, because it is about your room, your menu and your line, and because you can repeat it after you change something.

Then do the subtraction honestly, including the part where we lose

Our cost comparison asks you for the number of screens you want and what you pay for your current system each month, and it asks for the minutes a day you expect to save only if you have measured them in your own kitchen. If you leave that blank it does not fill it in, and it does not count a saving it cannot source.

The result of that is frequently unflattering to us. A kitchen running on paper today and paying nothing for software is told, plainly, that we cost them more than they currently spend, because we do. A calculator that always concludes you should buy is an advertisement wearing a tool's clothing.

Our own price is on the pricing page with no form in front of it, so you can do the whole sum on paper without talking to anybody, and get the same answer we get.

The one thing to do on your next shift

Put a docket on a clip by the pass and make a mark on it every time a ticket is missed, remade or walked back. Do it for seven days without changing anything else. At the end of the week you will have a number that is true about your kitchen, which is more than this post or any other one can give you.

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