What 125 restaurants taught us about billing software

The counter is the product

We began building Ethos in June 2013 for four Fresspresso cafés. We thought of it then as a billing screen with a database behind it. Today it bills in 125+ restaurants and cafés, Fresspresso alone runs 50+ of them on it, and we think of it as the thing that stands between a queue and a kitchen. Most of what we have learned about billing software comes back to that one idea.

A café counter at eight in the morning is not an office. The operator has one hand on the till and one eye on the door. If a bill takes four taps where it could take two, the queue grows by a person a minute. So the first lesson was blunt: billing software is judged by thumbs, not by feature lists. Ethos was built touch-first from the start. The common items sit on the first screen, modifiers are one tap away, and the tender buttons are large enough to hit without looking down.

The connection will drop, and the floor cannot wait

Every restaurant loses its internet at some point. The question is what the till does next. A cloud-only till does nothing: the queue stands, the kitchen waits, and the owner is on the phone to the ISP instead of the customer.

So Ethos bills locally. Each outlet keeps its own store on its own machine, and the bill prints whether or not the link is up. When the connection returns, the terminal syncs its bills to the central database and the owner's reports catch up. We put this in place for the first outlets and the principle has not changed since. A connected till is a convenience. A till that keeps serving when it is disconnected is what you are actually paying for.

Owners want one picture, not six phone calls

Once the counters were running, the next request was always the same: show me the whole business in one place. By January 2014 we had centralised cloud reporting with database synchronisation, a single address holding the reports for every terminal in the country. An owner with cafés in three cities should not need three calls to learn yesterday's sales. The reports are read from the centre, so a busy till is never slowed down by someone running a month-end report on it.

Orders now arrive from everywhere

In July 2016 Ethos began accepting orders from third-party and mobile applications. The lesson behind that date is one every restaurant now knows: an aggregator order that lives on a separate tablet is an order that gets missed on a busy night. Outside orders have to land in the same billing queue as counter orders, deduct the same stock and show in the same reports. Which integrations are live for a given brand is confirmed during setup, because the list changes and we would rather confirm than promise.

Tax is a rule, not a text box

A bill is a legal document. GST rates, tender types and invoice formats change, and a till that hard-codes them has to be reinstalled every time they do. In Ethos the tax and tender rules live in their own layer, so a change is a configuration, not a new build. GST-aware bills, e-bills, a QR code on the invoice and store-branded receipts all come out of the same rule set.

Stock moves by recipe, not by cup

Counting cups sold tells an owner very little. What they need to know is how much milk and how many beans left the store this week, and whether that matches the deliveries. Ethos deducts stock per recipe when a bill is raised. That is what makes variance visible, and variance is where a café's margin quietly goes.

Support is part of the software

A till is only as good as the person who answers when it misbehaves at peak time. Ethos is hosted, supported and extended by ATPL; it is a product we run, not a script we handed over. The Fresspresso relationship has run continuously since 2013, and Duke's Cafe & Bistro, Green Leaf Hospitality and Ethos Restaurant Solutions bill on the same platform. Dhiren Surjiani, Director at Fresspresso Hospitality, put it this way: "The customized software not only simplifies transactions but also enhances our customer service."

Where Ethos is the wrong tool

Ethos is built for food service: café, fine dining, QSR, food court and multi-outlet groups. A boutique selling barcoded garments needs retail stock logic we did not build into it. A single stall with ten items and no plan for a second outlet may be served well enough by a free app, and we will say so in the first call rather than sell a system it does not need.

If you run a restaurant or a group of them and want to see how Ethos handles billing, reporting and order intake, the Ethos product page sets out what it does, who runs on it and what setup involves.