A bottle of wine is comped on table four on Saturday night. On Monday the owner asks who authorised it. The till says the order was placed by "Restaurant Terminal 1", which is a device, not a person.
Six waiters used that tablet across the shift. Nobody is lying and nobody can answer. The conversation ends with everybody slightly suspected and the owner deciding to stop comping anything, which costs more goodwill than the bottle did.
The same ambiguity has a quieter cost every day: tips cannot be attributed, section performance cannot be measured, and a guest complaint about service reaches "somebody on Saturday".
Splitting the two identities fixes it without buying six devices. The browser session authenticates the device; a short PIN authenticates the waiter, per browser tab — so two waiters can genuinely work side by side on one tablet and every order, void and comp is attributed to the person who keyed it.
Logging out in one tab leaves the other logged in, because they are different people. And when the drawer is handed over at shift change, the outgoing operator's tab sessions are revoked, because they have walked away from a shared device.
Why this matters to you: attribution is not about catching staff. It is about being able to answer an ordinary question without an accusation, which is the difference between a team that trusts the system and a team that works around it.