The restaurant POS system that runs your whole venue

Search for a restaurant POS system and you will find two kinds of software: terminal systems that do payments brilliantly and nothing else, and hospitality suites priced for venue groups. Most Australian cafes, bistros and takeaway kitchens sit in between. They need the till, the floor, the menu, the bookings and the books to work together, without five subscriptions and five logins. OneBookPlus Restaurant is built for that middle. The POS, menu management, table management and reservations run inside the same platform as your invoicing, contacts, expenses and accounting, so a Friday night's trade lands in the same profit and loss as the week's supplier bills. Nothing syncs, because nothing is separate. And because the platform starts free (the POS itself is a $39 per month add-on with a 14-day trial, while menu and table management cost nothing), the total is a fraction of what a terminal-based restaurant POS software contract adds up to once hardware, per-register fees and the accounting connector are counted.

The POS itself runs in a browser on hardware you already own: an iPad at the counter, an Android tablet at the pass, the office laptop for phone orders. It handles four order channels (dine-in, takeaway, pickup and delivery) through one screen. Dine-in orders carry a table and cover count pulled from your floor plan; pickup and delivery orders capture the customer details instead. At settlement you can apply a flat or percentage discount, add a tip, and record cash or card, and the printed receipt itemises the order with GST included, exactly as Australian customers expect. Orders are tracked live from placed to closed, so anyone can glance at the venue screen and see what is open, on which table, and for how long. There is no proprietary terminal to lease, no lock-in contract and no per-register licence: every device you sign into is a register.

Menu management is where a lot of restaurant POS software gets fiddly, so OneBookPlus keeps it direct. Build the menu once: categories such as starters, mains and drinks; items with descriptions, photos and prices; and dietary tags for vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and halal, so customers can self-serve the questions your staff would otherwise field all shift. When a dish runs out mid-service, toggle it off with one tap and it disappears from the POS immediately; toggle it back on when tomorrow's delivery arrives. Specials and seasonal changes work the same way, from any device, without reprinting anything. Prices are GST-aware, so what you type is what the customer pays and the tax component takes care of itself. Menu Management is free on every OneBookPlus plan, which matters: on terminal-based systems, menu tools often sit behind the pricing tier you were hoping to avoid.

The same menu powers a QR code digital menu at no extra cost. Print the code from Menu Management, drop it into table talkers, and customers scan to browse the live menu on their phones, photos and dietary tags included. Because it reads the same data as the POS, a sold-out item leaves the customer-facing menu at the same moment it leaves your order screen, so nobody orders the gnocchi that ran out an hour ago. For venues with a OneBookPlus website, the menu appears there too and stays current automatically, which quietly fixes the most common restaurant website failure: the PDF menu from two winters ago.

Table management maps the venue as it actually is: multiple rooms (main floor, courtyard, function room), tables with real seat capacities, arranged with a visual floor plan editor. Status flows from the POS, so when an order opens on table 12 the floor plan shows it occupied, and when the bill settles it shows the table ready to turn. Front of house and the pass see the same live picture instead of shouting across the room. Reservations are built into the same system: party size, time, notes and table assignment, with statuses for confirmed, seated and no-show, plus a waitlist for walk-ins on nights the floor is full. There is no OpenTable-style third-party subscription taking a per-cover fee, and tonight's bookings appear on the restaurant dashboard next to live orders and today's revenue. Table Management, like Menu Management, is free on every plan.

Where OneBookPlus separates from POS-only systems is what happens after service. The end-of-day screen already knows what the till should hold, because it reads the day's closed POS orders: expected cash, expected card. Enter your opening float, count the drawer, and the variance is computed live, with a recommended banking deposit after tomorrow's float is set aside and a notes field for the twenty-dollar IOU. Daily sales then post into OneBookPlus accounting itself, not into an export file waiting for a bookkeeper. Your P&L shows venue revenue against supplier bills and expenses in the same ledger, and your BAS-ready GST summary (G1, 1A, 1B) accumulates as you trade. Venues on terminal POS systems typically pay separately for accounting software and the connector between the two, then spend month-end reconciling whatever the connector missed. Here there is nothing to connect.

Margins in hospitality are won at the plate, so OneBookPlus includes recipe costing. Build each dish from its ingredients with quantities, unit costs and a wastage percentage, and the true cost per plate is calculated for you, including the trim that goes in the bin. When your chicken supplier reprices, update one ingredient and every affected dish recosts. Pair that with supplier bills recorded as expenses and you can see, in one place, whether the menu you are proud of is also the menu that pays the rent. It is the discipline consultants charge for, built into the same software that took the orders.

If you are comparing restaurant POS systems in Australia, the honest summary is this: Square is excellent for payments and has a genuine free tier; Lightspeed is a capable hospitality POS with deep inventory; Impos is a well-regarded local system sold quote-first. All three stop at the edges of the till. None of them will send the quote for Saturday's function, invoice the corporate catering client, chase the unpaid balance, request the Google review after a great night, or produce your BAS summary without a bolted-on accounting subscription. OneBookPlus does those in the same login as the POS. Starting is deliberately low-risk: create a free account, build the menu and floor plan (both free), and trial the POS for 14 days before the $39 per month begins. If it turns out not to suit your venue, the menu, contacts and books you built stay useful anyway, because the platform underneath is a full business suite, not just a till.

The restaurant POS is part of a wider hospitality toolkit: you can see how cafes run counter service on OneBookPlus, explore the full package for restaurants, browse the hospitality hub, or read about the Point of Sale app.