It is Friday night in Lahore. The dining hall is full, riders are waiting at the counter, the biryani pot was scraped clean twenty minutes ago, and new online orders keep arriving. Every owner knows this moment.
A busy night is good news. It only turns bad when customers order things you cannot make, or wait an hour for food you promised in thirty minutes. The fix is not to work harder. It is to use the right switch at the right time.
This playbook walks through the controls in Krobr Partner, the store-management app, and when to reach for each one. Start with the smallest change and only move to a bigger one when you need to.
Why online orders go wrong on a busy night
Most rush-hour problems come from the menu saying one thing while the kitchen is doing another. The common ones look like this:
- A dish is sold out, but customers can still order it, so you end up calling them to cancel or swap.
- The kitchen is backed up, but new orders keep landing as if everything were normal.
- The store closes at 11, but the website still accepts orders at 11:40 because nobody set the hours.
- Breakfast items are still orderable at 9 pm.
Each of these has its own control. Switching the whole store off because one dish ran out costs you sales you could have kept.
Your controls at a glance
| Problem | Control | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| One dish or option has run out | Snooze or mark unavailable | Customers can see it but cannot order it |
| Kitchen needs a short breather | Pause new orders | New orders stop and the store reopens on its own |
| You need to stop everything now | Busy mode (go offline) | All new orders stop until you switch back |
| Orders arrive outside your real timings | Opening hours and closures | The store only takes orders when you are open |
| Some items only make sense at certain times | Dayparts | Items are orderable only in their time window |
The rest of this post goes through them in the order you will usually need them.
Before the rush: set hours that match reality
The quietest mistake is never setting opening hours at all. In Krobr, a store whose hours have never been configured takes orders at any time. That is handy on day one, but it means a hungry customer can place an order at 3 am and wonder why nobody answers.
Open Hours in Krobr Partner and set each weekday. A few tips that save trouble later:
- Use two ranges if you close in the afternoon. Many restaurants serve lunch, close for a few hours, then open again for dinner. Add a second time range for that day instead of leaving one long window.
- Handle late nights properly. If you close at 2 am, use the supported overnight range so the closing time belongs to the next day.
- Copy a day to save time. Set Monday carefully, then copy it to the other weekdays and adjust the weekend.
- Check the store timezone. Hours follow your store's timezone, not the phone of whoever is editing them.
- Add closures for special days. For Eid, a family wedding or a renovation, add a closure for those dates. It overrides the weekly schedule without you touching it.
The full walkthrough is in the help guide for store status and hours.
Dayparts: the right menu at the right time
Opening hours decide when you take orders. Dayparts decide which items can be ordered within those hours. You can set up to three, such as breakfast, lunch and dinner, and assign items to them. An item with no daypart is available all day.
So your halwa puri breakfast can switch itself off at noon, and your karahi can wait until the evening, without anyone remembering to do it. The dayparts guide shows the setup step by step.
During the rush: snooze, do not delete
When a dish runs out, the instinct is to hide it or delete it. Do neither. Deleting loses your photos, options and order history. Instead, open the item in Krobr Partner and change its availability.
You can mark it unavailable or snooze it for a set time. A snoozed item comes back by itself when the time is up. Choosing "until tomorrow" brings it back at midnight in your store's timezone, which is usually exactly what you want when the biryani is finished for the night.
A few things worth knowing:
- Options can be snoozed too. If you run out of the large size or the extra cheese, snooze just that option and keep selling the rest.
- Keep one valid choice in required groups. If a dish needs a size and you snooze every size, nobody can order it. Leave at least one available.
- Use the category control for bigger gaps. If the grill breaks down, you can change the availability of a whole category at once. Read which items it affects before you confirm.
- There is no save button to forget. Availability changes are live. Wait for the success message, then check the item on your storefront.
The item availability guide covers every option.
When the kitchen falls behind: pause
Sometimes nothing has run out, the kitchen is simply drowning. That is when you pause new orders. You choose how long the pause lasts, and the store reopens automatically when the time is up. You do not need to remember to switch it back on, which matters a lot when your hands are full of naan.
Orders you already accepted carry on as normal while you are paused, so the team can catch up without new tickets piling on. Future table reservations also stay available, because a booking for next Saturday has nothing to do with tonight's queue.
Pair the pause with honest prep times. When you accept an order, you set an estimated preparation time, and the customer sees progress on their private order status link. If tonight's food is taking 45 minutes, say 45 minutes. A customer who was told the truth is far calmer than one who was promised 20.
When you need to stop completely: busy mode
Busy mode is the big switch. It takes the store offline and stops all new orders instantly, without touching any item settings. Use it when something serious happens: the gas supply cuts out, a key cook goes home sick, or the queue is so long that even a pause will not be enough.
The difference from a pause is that busy mode stays on until you switch it back. That makes it powerful, and also easy to forget. Make it one person's job to turn the store back online, and put it on your closing checklist.
Who presses the buttons
On a busy night, the owner is rarely the one next to the screen. Krobr lets you add team members with their own permissions, so a trusted manager can snooze items or pause orders without full control of the store.
The focused phone apps help too. The Orders app sends push notifications for new orders, and the Stock app gives a quick screen for marking items available or not.
A simple busy-night routine
Print this and stick it near the counter:
- Before opening: check that today's hours and any closures are right, and that dayparts match the menu you are serving.
- At the first sign of a shortage: snooze the item or option, not the whole store.
- When tickets pile up: set realistic prep times on new orders, then pause for a short while if needed.
- If something serious happens: switch on busy mode, and tell one person they own switching it back.
- At closing: confirm the store is back online for tomorrow and clear any snoozes that should not carry over.
- Next morning: look at what ran out and adjust quantities, so tonight is smoother.
If you are still getting your first online orders set up, our first 50 online orders checklist covers what to prepare before the rush ever arrives.
The short version
Match the size of the control to the size of the problem. Snooze a dish that ran out. Pause when the kitchen needs a breather. Use busy mode only when you must stop everything. Set your hours and dayparts once so the menu looks after itself. Do this, and a packed Friday becomes the kind of night you hope for, not the kind you dread.