Introducing Zoho POS for Restaurants
Hello Community,
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Zoho POS for Restaurants, unveiled at the 30th milestone edition of Zoholics India 2026.
Running a restaurant involves multiple teams and workflows. A single table journey, from seating a guest to closing the bill, involves the host, server, kitchen staff, and cashier. When these hand offs are disconnected, they can lead to delays, errors, and a poor customer experience.
Zoho POS for Restaurants is built around these workflows. It connects your front-of-house and back-of-house operations in a single system. Orders entered by servers at the table can be sent directly to the kitchen, eliminating the need for paper tickets or verbal communication. Kitchen staff can also update order statuses, allowing floor staff to stay informed about the progress of each order without having to leave the dining area.
Menu management
A well-structured menu is an essential part of running a restaurant. Before creating a menu, you can add the food items and ingredients required for your business operations.
Food items can be managed in different ways depending on how your restaurant operates. For example, if you directly sell a packaged or ready-to-sell food product, you can add it as an item and include it in your menu. You can then track its stock based on its availability.
If your business involves preparing food, you can add the ingredients used in the preparation process, such as oil, vegetables, and other raw materials. These ingredients don't need to be displayed on the menu. Instead, you can associate them with a composite item, which represents the final food product that is added to your menu. The stock of the composite item is determined based on the availability of its associated ingredients.
You can also create modifiers to provide customers with additional options when ordering food. For example, you can create modifiers for pizza toppings, beverages, seasonings, and more. Modifiers can have their own prices, associated items, and stock levels, and can be added to your menu as required.
Once you've created your food items and modifiers, you can create a customized menu for your restaurant. Menus can be assigned based on locations, sales channels, and specific dates or times.
You can organize food items into groups and subgroups based on your business requirements. You can also configure different prices for the same menu, which can be useful when you want to maintain separate pricing for offline and online sales.
You can even host your menu online and share it with customers using a QR menu, making it easy for them to browse your offerings from their own devices.
Order and billing management
Your order and billing workflow can vary depending on your restaurant's business model. Zoho POS provides dedicated sales channel devices—including the POS Register, Waiter App, and Self-Ordering Kiosk to support different ordering and billing scenarios.
You can configure these sales channels based on your restaurant's requirements and use them individually or together.
POS Register
The POS Register is suitable for a wide range of restaurant business models and supports both ordering and billing workflows.
For example, if you operate a QSR without dining facilities, you can use the POS Register to add items and bill customers. Once the order is placed, the Kitchen Order Ticket (KOT) can be sent directly to the kitchen for preparation.
If your restaurant offers dine-in service, you can create dining areas and tables, along with their seating capacities. When taking an order, you can select the relevant table, specify the number of guests, and add the customer's order. KOTs can then be sent to the kitchen for preparation.
Waiter App
The Waiter App is designed specifically for waiters to take orders directly from tables.
You can create waiter profiles and assign devices to them. You can also restrict waiters to specific tables based on your restaurant's requirements.
Waiters can select a table, enter the number of guests, add items to the order, and send KOTs directly to the kitchen. Multiple KOTs can be sent for the same table as customers place additional orders.
Once the customers finish dining, the sale can be completed and sent for billing through the appropriate billing workflow.
Kiosk
The Self-Ordering Kiosk is designed primarily for self-service restaurant models, where customers can place their own orders, make payments, and collect their food.
If you operate with limited staff or want to manage customer queues more efficiently, you can install self-ordering kiosks and allow customers to complete the ordering process themselves.
The workflow is simple: Customers browse the menu, add items to their cart, complete the payment, and place the order. The KOT is then sent to the kitchen, where the order is prepared. Once the food is ready, the customer can collect it.
All these sales channels can work together in the same restaurant, supporting both online and offline operations. You can create registers based on your business requirements and assign unique billing sequences to help identify transactions.
You can also control access to each sales channel using user roles and permissions. Session management helps you track users' activities across these sales channels on a daily basis.
Food aggregator
If you want to take your restaurant online and reach customers beyond your physical location, you can integrate Zoho POS with hyper local food aggregators such as Swiggy and Zomato.
If you're already using these platforms, you can connect them to Zoho POS using your dedicated aggregator ID and partner portal URL. If you're new to these platforms, you can complete their onboarding process first and integrate them with Zoho POS afterward.
During the integration process, you can configure the store location, menu, order-receiving device, and deposit account. Once the integration is complete, orders from the food aggregator can be received and managed directly from your configured order-receiving device.
You can also configure preferences such as preparation time, order actions, and automatic order acceptance.
If a particular food item is temporarily unavailable, you can disable it from the POS Register. You can also configure a time after which the item is automatically made available again.
Payments
Billing in a restaurant context is rarely straightforward. Zoho POS for Restaurants handles scenarios that come up every service: splitting a bill between guests, merging two tables that have been seated together, applying item-level or order-level discounts, and processing payments across multiple methods in a single transaction. A table of four can settle their bill with two cards, one cash payment, and a gift voucher applied to the remainder, and the system will record each payment method against the same order.
Zoho POS Indian edition supports multiple payment providers, including Paytm, PhonePe, Pine Labs, Razorpay, and more. Depending on the payment provider, you can accept different payment methods such as cash, cards, wallets, UPI, and more.
Catering & events management
If your restaurant handles large food orders for events or catering, you can manage these orders using the Catering & Events module.
You can manage bulk orders through Sales Orders. If an order requires shipping, you can use the Packaging and Shipment sub-modules to manage the fulfillment process.
You can also manage returns through the Returns module.
Multi-outlet management
If you operate more than one restaurant location, Zoho POS for Restaurants lets you manage all of them from a central configuration. Menus, pricing, staff roles, and permissions can be set at the organization level and applied to individual outlets, or each outlet can be configured independently depending on how your business is structured.
Users, roles, and permissions
Zoho POS for Restaurants lets you define what each staff role can see and do within the system. A billing staff member may have access to the payment screen but not to the configuration settings. A supervisor may be able to apply discounts above a set threshold that a server cannot. A store manager may be able to view reports that are not visible to front-of-house staff. These permissions can be configured per role and applied consistently across your team, reducing the risk of unauthorized changes and keeping each person focused on their part of the workflow.
Dashboard and reports
Zoho POS stores the information generated through your day-to-day operations, including users, items, transactions, payments, inventory, and more.
You can use the Reports module to analyze this data and gain insights into your business performance. The reporting tools in Zoho POS for Restaurants give you a view of your operation beyond the current service.
Some of the key reports include:
- Sales by Customer
- Sales by Item
- Profit by Item
- Inventory Valuation Summary
- FIFO Summary
- Table Performance Summary
- Inventory Aging Summary
- Stock Summary
- Payments Summary
- Activity Logs
- Audit Trail
You can also get a quick overview of your business through Dashboards. Dashboards are displayed when you log in to Zoho POS, giving you access to important business insights at the start of your day.
Key dashboard insights include sales summaries, sales by sales channel, inventory aging, item trends, and other statistics that can help you monitor your daily operations and make informed decisions.
Availability and Specifications
Zoho POS for Restaurants is available in four plans: Free, Essential, Signature, and Premium, each offering a different set of features and capabilities.
To support budding restaurateurs in India, the Free plan supports invoices of up to ₹12 lakhs in annual value.
Zoho POS for Restaurants supports both online and offline operations. Zoho POS Web is the cloud-based administrative application that requires an internet connection and is used as the back-of-house system.
The following sales channel front-of-house applications support both online and offline operations:
Sales Channel | Platform |
POS Register | |
Waiter App |
From managing menus and table orders to streamlining kitchen operations, payments, online orders, and business insights, Zoho POS for Restaurants brings your restaurant's essential operations together in one place.
Whether you're running a café, QSR, bakery, dine-in restaurant, or catering business, you can configure Zoho POS to suit your business model and scale as your business grows.
Ready to simplify your restaurant operations? Explore Zoho POS for Restaurants and discover how it can help you serve your customers better and run your business more efficiently.