Square for Restaurants

Square for Restaurants is the hospitality configuration of Square's point of sale, sitting within a toolkit that starts free and extends across payments, staff management and reporting. Restaurant point of sale is a distinct product from retail for reasons that become obvious in service.

An order in a restaurant is opened, added to over an hour, split between people paying separately and closed with a tip, all while the table is occupied and the kitchen needs to know each course as it is ordered. Retail point of sale assumes a transaction that starts and finishes in a minute.

The kitchen display application, listed at thirty dollars a month with additional devices at twenty, replaces printed tickets with screens showing courses, timers and modifications. Paper tickets get lost, smudged and misread, and each of those is a remade dish and a delayed table.

Starting from zero is the commercial argument that brings restaurants in. A new operator can take payments on day one without a monthly commitment and add capability as the business establishes itself, which suits an industry where a substantial share of new openings do not survive their first year of trading. The cost only grows as the business does, which is the correct shape for a restaurant deciding what to commit to before it knows whether it will be busy.