Evaluation guide
Choosing a restaurant POS
Most systems can take an order. The differences show up in what happens afterwards — to your stock, your food cost, and your books.
What actually varies between restaurant systems
Taking an order and printing a bill is solved. Every system on the market does it, and a demo of it tells you almost nothing.
What varies enormously is what happens after the sale: whether the ingredients come out of stock, whether the dish has a real cost attached, whether a supplier invoice becomes data without someone typing it, and whether the day closes into accounts your accountant can file from.
The questions below are the ones that separate systems. Take them to everyone you are evaluating, including us.
The questions to ask
Ask every vendor. The useful signal is often how quickly they change the subject.
When a supplier invoice arrives at a new price, does every dish using that ingredient re-cost by itself?
In Qvian: Yes — including through sub-recipes, so a house sauce used in six dishes moves all six. You do nothing.
Will it tell you when a dish's cost is built on incomplete data, or show a confident number either way?
In Qvian: Qvian flags those dishes rather than pricing them as though the missing ingredients were free. A number you cannot trust is worse than no number, and most systems will not tell you which is which.
Does selling a dish take its ingredients out of stock?
In Qvian: Yes, through the recipe — and what leaves stock is measured with the same conversion used to cost it, so your food cost and your stock never disagree.
Can you photograph a supplier invoice and have it become a posted purchase?
In Qvian: Yes. Whoever receives the delivery captures it at the door; whoever is allowed to post it reviews and posts it. Those are deliberately different permissions.
Does it show what a delivery does to your margin before you receive it?
In Qvian: Your average cost, the new average cost, what you currently charge, and the resulting margin — with the option to re-price while the invoice is still open, rather than six weeks later after you have sold the stock at the old price.
Can you see which supplier has quietly been raising prices, before it shows up in your margin?
In Qvian: Biggest increases, biggest drops, and the products whose price moves most — across every supplier you buy from.
Does closing the day post your books and create your tax records, or is that a separate month-end exercise?
In Qvian: Closing the day does both. And the system knows exactly which days you have not closed — which is usually the reason a return comes out short.
At close, does it verify every payment method — or just count the cash?
In Qvian: Cash by denomination, plus card, transfer and room charges checked against your terminal, each with its own variance and a reason. A discrepancy is found the same day rather than in a bank reconciliation three weeks later.
Can your staff do their actual job from a phone, or do they need a back-office computer?
In Qvian: Nineteen areas of the system run on the staff app, and each person pins the three they use all day.
When Qvian is the wrong answer
Genuinely — there are operations this is too much system for.
- A single counter with no kitchen, no stock to speak of, and no intention of costing anything. A simple till is a better fit and cheaper.
- A business that will not close its day. Almost everything good here depends on that one habit, and no software fixes it.
- Anyone who needs to keep their existing accounting as the source of truth and only wants a till bolted on.
The only comparison figure we quote
A competitor offered our clients free service for life. They stayed, at several times the price. That is the only comparison statistic we have any business quoting.
Frequently asked
Whether a change in a supplier price flows through to the cost of every dish that uses that ingredient, without anyone re-doing a spreadsheet. Almost everything else in food-cost control depends on that one link existing.
Most operators have a food cost number built once, from partial data, and never audited. The question worth asking is not what the number is but how much of your menu it is actually based on. Qvian flags dishes whose cost is incomplete rather than pricing them as though the missing ingredients were free.
Some can. In Qvian, sales, purchases, stock movements and payroll each post their own double-entry journal entries as they happen, so the books are a by-product of trading rather than a monthly re-keying exercise. Closing the day is what posts it and creates the tax records for that day.
This is the real switching cost and the reason most restaurants stay put. Qvian imports a menu from a link, photographs, or your own recipe book, and builds the recipes underneath it so the menu arrives costed rather than as a price list.
Qvian runs in a browser and on a staff mobile app, so any computer, tablet or phone works from the first day. Receipt printers and scanners connect when you want them.
Other evaluation guides
See it against your own numbers.
Bring a supplier invoice and your menu. That is the whole demonstration.