What is KOT (Kitchen Order Ticket)?
A KOT, or Kitchen Order Ticket, is the slip that tells the kitchen what to cook for a specific table. Traditionally the waiter writes it by hand in duplicate; in a digital system the order punched on a phone or POS prints automatically on a small thermal printer in the kitchen, or appears on a kitchen display screen, with table number, items, quantities and special instructions.
Digital KOTs fix the two classic Indian restaurant problems: unreadable handwriting causing wrong dishes, and "missing" KOTs enabling billing leakage where items are served but never billed. Because every KOT is numbered and logged, owners can match kitchen output against billed sales at day end. A busy dhaba doing 200 orders a night typically recovers the cost of a KOT printer within weeks through leakage control alone.