What are Orders?
Orders in Centro
Orders let your guests request products and services from the Centro app — room service and food & beverage, amenities, and bookable services such as a spa treatment or an activity — and let your staff take payment, track, and fulfil those requests. An order is a single basket a guest places: one or more items, a total, a status that moves as the order is handled, and a message thread the guest and staff can use to talk about it.
Orders turn Centro from an information app into a place where guests can transact, and give your team a single queue to work from.
What can be ordered
Everything a guest can order comes from your catalogue of products. A product can be:
- a physical item or service with a price and, optionally, stock — a burger, a bottle of wine, a late checkout, or
- a bookable service tied to a calendar resource — the guest picks a date and time slot (for example a spa appointment or an activity), or
- a request — a free service request with no charge.
You group products into a collection (your menu or store) and decide how they're presented in the app.
Who does what
- Guests browse the store, add items to a basket, check out and pay, then track the order and message staff about it. See The guest ordering experience.
- Staff and managers see incoming orders in a queue, move them through their statuses, and fulfil them. See Managing orders.
- Administrators build the catalogue, define the ordering workflow (the statuses an order moves through), and set up the store. See Setting up ordering.
How ordering fits together
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| Catalogue | Your products, their prices, tax, stock and images — grouped into collections. |
| Activity type | The workflow an order follows: the ordered list of statuses (with names, colours, icons and ETAs) it moves through, and the emails sent along the way. |
| Centro Flex Store | The plugin that surfaces a store in the app — a menu to browse, a basket, checkout and confirmation. It ties a product collection to an ordering workflow. |
| Payments | Card payment is taken through Stripe at checkout. Payments can also be switched off, so an order is placed without a charge. |
| Messaging | Each order has a guest ↔ staff message thread, with ready-made messages such as "Your order is on its way". |
| Dashboards | The Orders and Order status statistics datasets report on order volume, value, delivery and cancellation rates and timings. |
If you're setting ordering up, begin with Setting up ordering. If you want to understand the statuses an order moves through, see Order lifecycle and statuses.