menu-MENAmenu-MENA
HomePricingBlogContact UsGet Started
The menu-MENA admin Orders board, showing five columns (New, Preparing, Ready, Completed, No-show) with draggable order cards listing items, price and a status dropdown.

Where Do Orders Go? Inside the Orders Dashboard

Ordering & Payments

By menu-MENA Team

Published on August 27, 2026

A guest scans your QR code, builds a cart, taps Send, and WhatsApp opens with the order typed out. That part is the well-known half of menu-MENA's ordering flow. The less obvious half is what happens on your end: at the same moment the WhatsApp message is being prepared, the order is also written to your Orders board. You don't copy it from a chat thread. It's already there.

Five columns, one board

Open Orders in the admin panel and you get five columns: New, Preparing, Ready, Completed, and No-show. Every order starts in New. From there, staff move it along by dragging the card to the next column or, if dragging on a phone screen mid-rush feels fiddly, by using the status dropdown at the bottom of the card instead. Both do the same thing.

Each column header shows a count, so a glance tells you how many orders are sitting in New versus how many are already Preparing. An empty column just says "No orders here."

What's actually on a card

Each card carries the order's last six characters as a reference ID (so you can compare it against the number in the WhatsApp message), plus a relative timestamp like "5 minutes ago." Below that:

  • A chip for dine-in or takeaway, and the table number if the guest picked dine-in
  • Up to four line items with quantity and name ("2× Chicken Shawarma"); a fifth item onward collapses to "+2 more" so the card doesn't grow into a wall of text
  • The total price, with the coupon code and discount shown separately if one was applied, and a small VAT line if the tenant has tax turned on
  • A status dropdown to jump straight to any column without dragging

Nothing on the card is invented after the fact. It's the same lines, quantities, and total the guest saw in their cart before they hit Send.

The WhatsApp button only shows up once

There's a WhatsApp icon on the card, but it doesn't appear until the order reaches Ready. Tap it and WhatsApp opens its contact picker rather than a specific chat, because the platform never asks guests for a phone number during WhatsApp ordering. You pick the right conversation and a message is pre-filled: "Hi [name], your order #[id] is ready!" in whichever language the admin panel is running in. It's a small thing, but it means the person expediting food doesn't have to type that message from scratch twenty times a shift.

If you've turned on card payments

Tenants who've connected Paymob get one more thing on the card: a payment chip reading Paid, Awaiting payment, Payment failed, or Refunded, plus a "Send payment link" button next to any order that isn't paid yet. Tapping it generates a checkout link and copies it straight to your clipboard, ready to paste into the same WhatsApp chat the order came from. If no gateway is connected, none of this renders. The card looks exactly like it always has, since the payment field is only ever present once a link has actually been created for that order.

It keeps itself current without you babysitting it

The board polls for new orders every 20 seconds on its own, and there's a manual refresh button in the header if you want it now. Drag a card and change your mind about the wifi mid-drag? The status change applies immediately on screen while the save happens in the background, so a slow connection doesn't make the card jump back and forth while you wait.

What happens off-screen

Two things happen the instant an order is logged that never show up on the board itself. First, if you haven't turned off order notifications, the owner gets an email with the order details and a link straight back to this page. Second, if the guest left a name, phone, or email in their order, it's added to your customer list, which is how WhatsApp orders turn into a customer list you can actually look at later instead of scrolling through old chats.

The board doesn't replace WhatsApp. The order still lands in your phone the same way it always did. What it adds is a second, shared place where the whole team, not just whoever's holding the phone that took the order, can see what's coming, what's cooking, and what's ready to go out.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. The moment a guest taps Send in the cart, the order is logged to your Orders board at the same time the WhatsApp message goes out. Nobody re-types anything. This happens whether the message opened WhatsApp directly, went through the copy-paste fallback for long orders, or needed the manual-copy modal because the browser blocked clipboard access. All three paths still log the order.

The board works exactly the same. Without a Paymob gateway connected, no payment chip and no Send payment link button appear on any card. Orders run purely on the WhatsApp handoff, the way the board has always worked.

The board loads your 200 most recent orders, newest first. That covers days or weeks of normal volume for one branch. It's meant for running today's service, not for pulling six months of sales history.

Yes. Anyone with edit access to that branch, owner or manager, sees the same board and can drag cards or change status. It refreshes automatically every 20 seconds, or tap the refresh icon in the header for an instant pull.

The card shows the new column immediately, but if the status update fails to save, the board quietly re-syncs to what's actually in the database and you'll see an error toast so you know to try again. You won't end up with a card sitting in the wrong column indefinitely.

No. Only the Ready column shows a WhatsApp button. Tap it and WhatsApp opens its own contact picker, since we never store a customer's phone number, so you pick the chat and send the pre-filled 'your order is ready' message yourself.