Bar Dashboard
Live orders from room service, restaurant, and guests — with recipe details, menu management, and inventory tracking. On screen the moment it's placed.
The Problem
A guest orders a gin and tonic through the guest portal at 9:15pm. The order goes to... somewhere. Maybe it gets printed in the kitchen. Maybe a waiter walks it over to the bar. Maybe it goes to the bartender's phone in a WhatsApp message from reception. By the time the drink is made and delivered, ten minutes have passed and the guest has flagged down a member of staff to ask where it is.
Meanwhile, the restaurant has three tables waiting on cocktails that were ordered alongside their food. Those orders went to the kitchen, because that's where the order system points. The kitchen chef read out the drink orders to nobody in particular, hoping someone would tell the bar. One table got their Aperol Spritz. The other two are still waiting, and the waiter doesn't know the status because the bar and the restaurant team are working from different versions of reality.
Your bar team aren't the problem. The lack of a dedicated, live view for bar operations is.
How It Works
Not the kitchen screen with a filter. A dedicated interface that shows only bar orders, bar recipes, and bar metrics.
Every drink order placed in your hotel — room service, restaurant, guest portal, or tableside via the Waiter App — appears on the Bar Dashboard the moment it's placed. No phone calls. No verbal relay from the kitchen.
Four-column kanban — New, Confirmed, Preparing, Ready. Tap to move orders through each stage.
Colour-coded timers — green under 15 minutes, amber 15-30, red over 30. See at a glance if anything is running long.
Special instructions — "less ice," "with lime," "no straw" — visible on every order card.
Pre-order badges — orders linked to restaurant reservations are flagged so the bar can prep ahead.
The bar controls what's available. When the elderflower gin is sold out, one tap removes it from every ordering channel in the hotel — guest portal, restaurant, waiter app. Instantly.
Toggle availability — mark items unavailable when you run out. They vanish from guest-facing menus immediately.
Edit prices and descriptions — adjust for happy hour or seasonal changes without waiting for a manager.
Shared inventory backbone — consumption logging, waste tracking, and expiring-soon alerts connected to the central system.
Every menu item can have a linked recipe with exact ingredients, quantities, and units. When a bartender needs to check a recipe — especially for a less common cocktail or a guest's custom request — it's right there in the app.
Two-panel layout — menu items on the left, ingredient details on the right with exact quantities and units.
Linked to inventory — recipes feed into stock tracking and cost calculations automatically.
Three real-time KPIs — Active Orders, Average Prep Time, and Completed Today — plus a Popular Items breakdown showing the top 5 best-selling drinks ranked by quantity.
Live KPIs — see how busy the bar is, how fast drinks are being made, and how many orders have been completed today.
Built-in issue reporting — broken glass washer? Ice machine down? Tap "Report Issue" and it goes straight to Maintenance as a tracked ticket.
In Practice
A typical evening shift on the Bar Dashboard.
The bartender arrives for the evening shift and opens the Bar Dashboard on the bar tablet. The greeting says "Good evening, Marcus" and today's date. Three KPI cards show the current state: two active orders from the tail end of the afternoon, average prep time running at six minutes, and fourteen drinks completed so far today.
Below that, the order queue. The two active orders are in the "Confirmed" column — the bartender taps the first one to start preparing. It moves to "Preparing." A new order comes in from the restaurant — three cocktails for Table 7, one with a note: "no ice in the Espresso Martini." It appears in the "New" column within a second. Marcus confirms it and starts lining up the glasses.
He also checks the Recipes page for the new seasonal cocktail the head bartender created yesterday — the ingredients and quantities are all there.
At 10pm, a room service order arrives: two Old Fashioneds for Room 8. The order card shows the order number, items, and a 0-minute timer that starts counting. Marcus makes the drinks, marks the order as ready, and it shows up for the duty manager or room service runner to deliver. The guest's portal shows "Ready for delivery."
There's no booking calendar. No housekeeping tasks. No revenue charts. The Bar Dashboard shows what bar staff need: orders, recipes, menu control, and a way to report problems. Nothing else.
Connected to Everything
When a guest orders a drink from their phone — room service or pre-dinner cocktail — the order appears on the Bar Dashboard in real time. No phone call to reception.
When a waiter takes a drink order tableside, beverage items go straight to the Bar Dashboard the moment the waiter confirms. No handwritten tickets.
Bar and Kitchen run independently, each showing only their own orders. When a table orders food and drinks, items route to the correct dashboard automatically.
The restaurant team sees bar order statuses alongside food orders. When the bartender marks cocktails as ready, the restaurant knows Table 7's drinks are waiting.
Bar order volumes, completion rates, and popular items feed into the manager's operations hub — without interrupting service.
Issues reported from the bar become maintenance tickets with priority levels and assignment tracking. Logged, assigned, and tracked until fixed.
This is what a connected bar looks like. A drink ordered from Room 8's phone at 10pm appears on the bar screen at 10:00pm. When the rosé runs out, nobody in the hotel can order it. Every app sees what it needs to see, the moment it needs to see it.
FAQ
Get Started
Your bar team shouldn't be guessing what's been ordered, working from verbal relay, or checking with the kitchen for drink orders that belong to them.
No credit card. No contract. No setup fees. Full access to every feature — including the Bar Dashboard — at every tier.
Prisma is a UK hotel management platform with 10 purpose-built department apps. The Bar Dashboard is one of ten dedicated applications included in every plan. Pricing starts at £49/month for properties with up to 10 rooms.
