Restaurant and café POS for table service, counter, takeaway and delivery

Four ways to serve from one till

Each shop chooses the order types it offers: Dine-in, Counter, Takeaway and Delivery. With Restaurant and café on, the till opens on an order-type bar, so one person can take a counter order while a waiter runs the tables. A café whose guests order at the counter and then sit can ask for a table number when the cashier presses Charge.

A shop with no order type chosen keeps the register it has today, so a business with a restaurant and a shop can run both. Switching it on takes a few minutes.

Tables on a map of the room

A manager draws each room once in the floor plan: its areas, rectangle, round and booth tables, their seats and a QR code for each table. The till shows the room as a live map with the state of every table: free or reserved, ordered or waiting on the kitchen, pre-bill printed, partly paid, or overdue. On a phone, the waiter sees the same tables as a list, with the ones that need attention first.

One check, shared by every phone and till

A check stays open on its table until it is paid. Several phones and tills can add to the same check at the same time: their additions are merged, each device shows who else is on the check, and only taking the payment locks it. An item can carry a seat and a course, choice groups ask for the size or the cooking with a minimum and a maximum, and an item's note goes with it to the kitchen. Taking orders shows the screens step by step.

Kitchen tickets and a kitchen screen

Each item goes to the kitchen station that makes it, by category or by product. A station prints its tickets on 58 or 80 mm thermal printers or on impact printers, shows them on a kitchen screen, or both. A later course can wait until the waiter fires it. A ticket that does not print raises an alert on the till that stays until someone deals with it, so an order is not lost in a jammed printer.

The kitchen screen runs in a web browser on a tablet or a computer. It has four views, a count of everything still to make, and a way to mark an item sold out for the day, which the tills then refuse.

Split checks, service charge and tips

A check splits by item, by seat, evenly, by sharing one item, or by amount. Each part becomes its own sale with its own number, receipt and payments, and the parts add up exactly to the check. Checks move between tables, tables merge, and items move from one check to another.

A service charge can be added at a percentage for each order type, and a tip is taken with the payment and credited to the check's waiter, apart from the sales. The pre-bill shows the guests what they owe before they pay, and says plainly that it is not a receipt.

Bookings, a QR menu, delivery apps and an order-ready screen

• Reservations and waitlist: staff book tables, the till holds a table before its booking, and a message to the guest opens in WhatsApp on your own phone or goes by e-mail.
• A QR menu on every table, in one of five designs. Guests can order while their table is seated, and as standard a member of staff accepts each order before it goes on the check.
• Pay at the table: guests pay by card from the QR page through your restaurant's own Paymob merchant account. PointLit never holds the money.
• Orders from delivery apps are typed in at the till from the app's tablet and followed until the courier picks them up. PointLit is not connected to Talabat directly yet.
• An order-ready screen on a TV shows the numbers of counter and takeaway orders under Preparing and Ready.

When the internet drops

Each device keeps working when the internet drops, and sends its changes when the line returns. With a Windows till set as the shop's hub, the tills also stay in step and print kitchen tickets over the shop's own network. A plain browser tab cannot join the hub, and neither can the PointLit Android app yet.

How it works in PointLit

1. In Business settings, switch on Restaurant and café, then open Restaurant settings for the service charge, tips, courses and the extras.
2. In Locations, choose each shop's order types.
3. Draw each room in Floor plan and print the table QR cards.
4. In Kitchen stations and printers, add the stations, their printers and the routes, and print a test ticket.
5. Choose the hub till in Shop network, and give staff the Waiter or Kitchen role in Members.