Start with how your restaurant actually runs
| If most of your orders are | What matters most | What matters less |
|---|---|---|
| At tables | Waiter’s phone, KOT rounds, moving and merging tables, a pre-bill | Delivery reconciliation |
| At a counter, paid first | One-tap Cash or UPI, a token screen, a short order slip | Table management |
| On delivery apps | Orders arriving by themselves, commission per order, payout checks | A waiter’s app |
| A mix, inside a hotel | The bill posting to the room, one set of books | A separate restaurant product |
The checklist
- The bill: GST, composition or no-tax bills, the FSSAI number, your printer’s roll width.
- The kitchen: numbered tickets by round, a kitchen screen by station, a cancel slip when a dish comes off.
- Tables: whose table it is, move, split and merge, without losing what the kitchen has.
- Stock: a recipe on each dish, so ingredients come off as you sell, and a shortage is named.
- The till: voids and free plates need a reason, big discounts need a manager, the drawer closes against a count.
- Staff: their own logins and limits, and attendance and pay if you want them in one place.
- When the internet drops: what still works, for how long, and what waits.
- Your data: can you take your menu, customers and bills away as a file?
The test: run a real service through it
Ask for your own menu to be loaded, then do these in order. A vendor who will not let you is telling you something.
- Take an order for a table of four, in two rounds, and send each to the kitchen.
- Change one dish after it has gone to the kitchen. Who is allowed, and what prints?
- Move the table, split the bill in two, and take cash on one half and UPI on the other.
- Cut the internet and take three bills.
- Refund one item from a paid bill. Does the drawer follow?
- Print on your own printer, not theirs.
- Close the day and compare the drawer with what you count.
What it really costs
The price on the page is rarely the whole cost. Ask for each of these in writing.
| Cost | What to ask |
|---|---|
| The plan | Per year or per month? Per outlet, per user or per device? |
| Add-ons | Are the kitchen screen, waiter’s app, QR ordering and reconciliation in my plan? |
| Hardware | Must I buy your printer or tablet, or may I use mine? |
| The second year | What is the renewal, and how much notice do I give to leave? |
| Messages | How many are included, and what do they cost after that? |
| Tax | Is GST on top of the figure I was shown? |
Published prices are side by side in this comparison.
Red flags
- A price you can only get after a call, with no period stated.
- A kitchen screen or waiter’s app shown in the demo that turns out to be an add-on.
- No way to get your data out as a spreadsheet.
- Discounts and voids with no reason and no name on them.
- A demo that uses their menu and never your own.
Setting it up, and the first month
- Load the menu with prices and tax, and print a test bill.
- Run it beside your current system for a day or two.
- Add recipes for your top ten dishes first, not all of them.
- Give each person their own login and limits.
- Count stock once at the start, and again a week later, to see the gap.