Wrong bill? Void, refund and reprint without losing the record.

The first move is not on the till. Stand beside the guest and read the bill back, line by line. Most arguments end there, because most of them are one line nobody ordered, a Half charged as a Full, or a round the table forgot they asked for. Once the guest agrees what is wrong, the correction takes one of four shapes, and picking the right one is the whole job.

You do not need the paper for this. A settled bill opens on screen from the Orders screen under View bill, item by item with the total, so a torn slip or a bill the guest left behind is not a reason to argue from memory.

If the argument is about a service charge, there is nothing to negotiate: it is voluntary and may not be added to a bill by default or under any other name, per the CCPA guidelines of 4 July 2022, upheld by the Delhi High Court on 28 March 2025 in National Restaurant Association of India v Union of India.

Which fix is right depends on where the order has got to, not on how loud the table is. A line the kitchen has never seen costs nothing to remove. The same line after the KOT has printed is cooked food. The same line after the bill is settled is a document. And one of the four is not your bill at all.

Row four is worth knowing by heart, because the counter usually gets it wrong in the expensive direction. Under the RBI's turnaround-time harmonisation circular of 20 September 2019, when a payer is debited and the beneficiary is not credited, the failed transaction is to be reversed by T+1, and beyond that the bank owes the customer ₹100 a day, paid on its own without a complaint. Taking the money a second time turns a bank's problem into your refund.

On rows two and three, DineCard's refund-policy page for Indian restaurants (read 2026-09-09) draws the line where it belongs: a cash refund is for a clear error, the wrong amount, a double charge, an order never delivered. Everything else is a manager's judgement, and a judgement is easier when the record is clean.

Until Fire KOT, the check is a draft. Take the line off and ring it again as Half instead of Full, or with the note the guest actually asked for, and nobody in the kitchen ever knows. No reason, no PIN, no write-off. This is the cheapest minute in the entire argument, which is why the twenty seconds of reading the order back at the table beats every control that comes after it.

Most of what turns into a dispute is decided here: the portion, the add-ons, and the note on the line that prints on the KOT so the cook sees "less spicy" and the guest gets what they asked for. The post on stopping wrong orders is about that half of the problem.

A fired line is a promise to a cook, so the register treats it differently. The quantity can be reduced freely: a table that took three waters and returned one is billed for two, with no manager anywhere near it. It cannot go up, because the kitchen only cooks what a KOT named, so a plus starts a new line that rides the next fire. And it cannot go to zero, because that is cooked food being written off. That needs a reason, picked from the four the register offers: the customer changed their mind, the kitchen cannot make it, it was rung on the wrong table, it was the wrong item. A cashier is then sent to the keypad for a manager's PIN. An owner or a manager confirms their own from the same dialog.

The cancelled line does not disappear. It stays on the check with a line through it, because the plate is real until somebody tells the kitchen otherwise, and because a check that quietly loses items at the end of the evening is the shape every skim takes. Petpooja's glossary entry on KOT cancellation names the oldest one plainly: the order is taken, the cash is pocketed, the KOT is cancelled, and the item never reaches the bill.

The protection is attribution, not the popup. Every void names the person who approved it on the order ledger, and the useful reading is the pattern rather than the single bill: StudioMatrx and BillSarthi both point at voids clustered on one shift, cancellations that only ever happen on cash, and items deleted after the KOT. One honest mistake looks nothing like that.

The honest limit today: the reason and the approver are both written to the order ledger, and neither is on a screen yet. The struck line on the check reads Cancelled — was sent 20:14, and there is no report that lists who approved what. Roles and PINs are set up in staff PINs and roles; the button-by-button version of this section is discounts, voids and refunds.

Once money has been taken, the bill is a document, and the correction sits beside it rather than inside it. The register refuses the edit on purpose. What it offers instead is a refund: the cashier re-types the amount, then a manager or the owner enters their PIN, and the payment out is recorded against that bill. The figure is not a choice: the register shows what is still owed and that exact amount has to be typed back, so a refund is the whole remainder and never a part of it. If the whole bill was wrong, refund it and ring the correct one again.

The reason is GST. Your issued bills carry a serial number, and that series goes to the department as a range in Table 13 of GSTR-1 (the monthly GST routine walks that return), so an invoice edited after the fact or removed to tidy up a day breaks a sequence someone can ask about later. The invoice rules that put the number there are summarised by ClearTax on chapter 6 of the CGST Rules, and a re-ring or a credit note is the correction those rules expect. There is also a practical reason: six months later, a refund sitting on the ledger against whoever was signed in, and the till, can be explained in one sentence, and a bill that changed cannot be explained at all.

The same principle shows up at closing time. On the day-close sheet, checks where money has already been taken are listed and cannot be voided, while a check nobody paid is written off with a reason typed out in full and a PIN, and that one is asked of everybody, the owner included. Money that came in does not leave the record because the evening ended. The day close guide walks that sheet, and the day-end report post covers what to read on it.

A reprint carries the same bill number with DUPLICATE stamped on it, and that is deliberate: one sale, one tax invoice. Rule 48(1)(b) of the CGST Rules has an invoice for services prepared in duplicate, marked ORIGINAL FOR RECIPIENT and DUPLICATE FOR SUPPLIER. A second copy printed as if it were a fresh bill would be a second sale on your series, which is a problem you would find months later.

Finding an older bill is the other half of this. The Orders screen has three tabs: Open for checks still running, Today for the current trading day, and Earlier, which takes a date and shows one business day at a time. Inside a day you can search by table, order number, bill number, dish or amount, and each settled bill carries a chip saying how it was paid, Cash, UPI, Card or Split. Opening one gives you View bill, Reprint receipt and Refund.

Two details make this work in a restaurant that closes late. A 12:40am bill belongs to the night it was rung, because the trading day starts at 4am and the owner can move it (dashboard settings). And the request is not rare, because GST records are kept for 72 months (the monthly GST routine has the section and the dates), so "I need the bill from last March" is a question your till should be able to answer.

None of it needs the internet at the shop. The register keeps selling and correcting on its own database and syncs when the line comes back (offline billing). If you want to try the four fixes on your own menu, EasyKOT is ₹299 a month or ₹2,990 a year plus 18% GST, with three months free and no card.