Square for Restaurants review: worthy POS system in Australia?

• Pros: Simple fees. Automated surcharging. No lock-in. Self-serve ordering. Kitchen display system. Payment integration. Instant transfers.
• Cons: No ingredient-tracking, supply ordering or table reservations. Features can be too simple.
• Best for: Small restaurants and busy cafés with a kitchen and several points of sale.

What is Square for Restaurants?

Square restaurant POS is a cloud-based system that works on iPad (or Square Register) and with Square EFTPOS terminals. It has restaurant-specific features for small single- or multi-location food venues, with options to connect with additional software.

The POS system generally requires an internet connection, but you can accept card payments in offline mode with the paid subscription. You can set up an unlimited number of tills, send orders to a kitchen printer – even integrate with online orders – among other things.

Many features are similar to Square’s free Point of Sale system. Cool things about Square are the complimentary functions such as QR code ordering and a virtual terminal.

Our opinion: has come a long way from a few years ago

Square for Restaurants is a welcome addition to the Australian Square offering. When it first launched, I found the checkout interface dull and a bit hard to grasp quickly, but the app has had a makeover. It now looks attractive, visually easier to comprehend and with more useful features like surcharging and offline payments.

“Square for Restaurants has surprised me with its recent upgrades in Australia. I love that auto-surcharging is now possible in a country where this is in demand, and the new POS app design makes it very intuitive to use when I tested it.”

– Emily Sorensen, Senior Editor, MobileTransaction

The paid subscription may still be overpriced for just one till. The main things you are paying for is a restaurant-tailored POS system with crucial features for this sector, customisations, coordinated orders between front and back of house, with 24/7 support thrown in for good measure. Other POS systems for hospitality have more advanced features for a similar price (or similar features for less), but with multiple tills at one location, Square can work out cheaper per iPad.

There’s also a lot of value in Square’s complimentary features like self-service ordering with online payments, a customer directory and staff timesheets.

Square integrates with tons of partner apps for various functions like customer loyalty, takeaway ordering, restaurant management and more, so there’s plenty of room for growth. What you can’t change is the fact it only works with Square’s own card terminals – there’s no option to use other payment systems.

A complex restaurant should check whether the POS system really has all it needs, though. Many useful features are there (e.g. kitchen display system, menu and table management, advanced gratuity, complex reporting), but certain advanced functions are not, like ingredient-level tracking and stock ordering.

The absence of a locked-in contract makes Square for Restaurants a low-risk investment, but finding out what functions you need in your food business is key to deciding whether it is the best value for your budget.

Pricing

There are three Square POS restaurant plans: Free, Plus and Premium.

The Free plan is (surprise, surprise) free and has the fewest features. The Plus plan is priced monthly at $129 incl. GST per location. Contrary to many other POS providers, this fee covers an unlimited number of POS terminals at the same location. Any additional trading locations will cost another $129 each. The price of the Premium plan is tailored, so you’ll need to speak to Square for a quote.

You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of Plus or Premium. Otherwise, you can always use the Free plan for an unlimited time.

The card transaction fee is the same for the Restaurants software as with Square’s other services: 1.6% per chip or tap transaction through any of Square’s EFTPOS machines. The fee applies to any card, whether it’s a credit or debit card, domestic, foreign or premium card, or mobile wallet. Square accepts eftpos, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and JCB cards.

Square has recently introduced surcharging, so merchants can recoup the exact transaction fee when customers pay. A very cool feature that Square also has is to schedule what days and times surcharging is automatically added, for instance on weekends and public holidays to help with the higher staff costs.

“Surcharging has become popular among Square merchants to switch on during weekends when customers are more willing to pay extra, and off on weekdays when people are perhaps less willing to pay the extra fee.”

– Emily Sorensen, Senior Editor, MobileTransaction

Chargebacks incur no admin fees, but with a customer refund, Square retains the transaction fee originally paid. Payouts are processed to your bank account for free the next business day, or instantly for an additional 1.5% fee.

“We know Square’s instant transfer option (which can be switched on and off) is popular in Australia. I think this is a key advantage of Square in Australia – no other EFTPOS provider currently settles transactions instantly.”

– Emily Sorensen, Senior Editor, MobileTransaction

Transactions through your online store, payment links, online ordering page or virtual terminal cost 2.2% – this applies to keyed transactions at your restaurant checkout as well.

In-house delivery orders placed online incur an additional $0.50 fee even though you deliver the food yourself. This is to pay for the additional features involved in takeaway orders, such as texting customers order updates.

Different Square Restaurant Kit bundles are available to purchase if you are not getting your own hardware elsewhere. The kit is delivered within 2-7 business days.

User experience

While Square is known for their user-friendly Point of Sale (the free POS app) interface, Square for Restaurants looks too simple to believe it has all the features you need in a restaurant. Don’t be fooled, though – the POS system is built for efficiency, giving you features for a tailored experience.

Food items or buttons can be grouped into menus (e.g. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner), groups (e.g. Hot Drinks, Sides, Shortcuts) and products with variants and modifiers (Americano, regular size, with milk).

You can basically customise the POS screen in many ways to fit your needs, for instance with bestsellers highlighted on the different menus. Many processes can be customised, such as whether to add service charge by default or manually. You can also choose the colour scheme: either light or dark.

The backend POS settings let you choose which screen to land on after certain actions, so the flow is partially decided by you.

But be prepared: Square asks you to set up many functions before the first time of using the app. This can be daunting for someone who hasn’t considered all the detailed ways to use a POS system. A more intuitive way is to decide all these things in steps as you are introduced to the functions visually in the software, with detailed explanations of what it all means. I had to look up some settings in the help section before I was able to make a qualified decision on some of them.

POS features

The restaurant POS software feels a bit like an extension of Square’s free “Point of Sale” app – but with more restaurant features and customisation options. The interaction between front-of-house and back-of-house operations, i.e. orders placed at the till and fired to the kitchen, is one of the key things you are paying for. This includes:

• Kitchen Display System (KDS) app
• Deciding which foods are fired immediately to the kitchen
• Timing of courses

Many features are similar to the free Point of Sale app, like all the payment methods (card reader, manual card entry, cash, cheques, vouchers, others), split bills, adding tax, tipping, product variants, customer library and gift cards. A difference with the Restaurants POS is that settings for each iPad till have options to tailor some of these functions further.

Let’s have a look at Restaurants features, some of which you’ll only find in the Plus (paid) plan.

Table tab functions: The visual floor plan, dividable into sections, is handy for keeping track of orders. Attach each bill to a person/chair and check the timer attached to each table for when the group arrived. Decide when the table should turn on the floor plan (e.g. after an hour) to make it easier to spot who’s likely to leave soon. You can also split bills after you started creating one order for a table, so each chair gets a separate receipt for their own items.

Kitchen Display System (KDS): This is a separate app for your kitchen included in the Plus plan. It receives orders in real-time, including from Uber Eats if connected to this, so you can prepare and organise orders efficiently.

Discounts and promotions: Set up various kinds of discounts like Buy One, Get One Free, Student Discount (% or $) and timed promotions like a Happy Hour offer on all alcoholic drinks on set days and times.

Service charge and gratuity: Discretionary service charges can be added to bills automatically, whether for larger groups (determined by number of seats) or everyone. It’s also possible to apply taxes to the service charge automatically or set up detailed tipping options.

Employee management: Set up individual staff accounts so you can analyse sales per employee, attach orders to individual colleagues, track work hours, set individual staff permissions and view timecards. Square for Restaurants requires employees to log in with a device code specific to the individual iPad.

Stock management: Products can be tracked, i.e. you can add stock levels for each item and automatically hide it when out of stock, but you can’t track ingredients. This means you need a separate system to manage food inventory and new stock orders.

“Stock levels are there for food items, but not ingredients. That doesn’t have to mean Square for Restaurants is not the right system for your restaurant, just that you should look for possible integrations like MarketMan to supplement it.”

– Emily Sorensen, Senior Editor, MobileTransaction

Customer library: For personal details like addresses, order history and saved payment methods (useful for invoices). You can’t add loyalty points to customer profiles unless you subscribe to the Loyalty add-on.

While all of the above can be done with Restaurants Plus, there are some limitations on the Free plan. On both plans, you get access to the Order Manager, fast entry orders, multi-location management, remote device management, open tills, repeat items, dining preferences and advanced discounts.

The differences between the plans are mainly:

In either case, you have access to many add-on features including:

• Square Invoices (useful for catering jobs)
• Virtual Terminal (for taking over-the-phone deposits)
• Square Online with online ordering
• Gift cards
• Timesheets

Features not included in the restaurant POS may be added through integrations with external apps compatible with Square. These apps cover functions like accounting, ecommerce, customer loyalty, inventory management and marketing.

External software will typically set you back extra with a monthly subscription. So consider carefully whether it is more economical to choose another POS solution containing all the features you need, or whether you don’t mind adding integrations that could make Square for Restaurants more costly.

Online and self-serve ordering

All Square merchants can mark POS transactions as eat-in, takeaway, delivery and pickup to distinguish transactions in the system. But Square also offers a free online page for customers to order from. This can be for click and collect (pickup) and takeaway deliveries, or self-serve orders within restaurant premises.

If self-service ordering is still your thing, then QR codes can be printed and placed on tables, which seated customers can scan with their phones. A web page with your menu then appears on the phone, where customers order and pay for meals themselves. Food orders are sent to the POS or kitchen display system to be prepared immediately.

Alternatively, Square for Restaurants can be connected with online takeaway websites (Menulog, Tanda, Uber Eats, me&u). This requires a Doshii or Deliverect or subscription.

Card payments and hardware

The Square for Restaurants POS app only works on iPad and Square Register, not iPhone, Android tablets or computers.

Square Register has a connected card terminal, whereas the iPad app only works directly with Square Reader or Square Stand which has a built-in card reader. You can also sync the system with Square Terminal to help with table-side orders. The system cannot be used with other EFTPOS machines.

Reports and analytics

Square’s analytics are accessed fully in the web dashboard (need to log in via an internet browser). These are just some of the things you can analyse in detail: sales trends, payment methods, discounts, modifier sales, labour vs. sales analyses, service charges, voids and gift cards.

The cash drawer is managed through the iPad app, where you start the day confirming the amount of cash, and close the till at the end of the day when you can verify the amount left in the till (note: these are Plus plan features).

The Square for Restaurants app allows you to view:

• Live sales (Plus only)
• Sales reports that can be emailed, printed or customised by day, device and team member
• Cash management reports detailing paid-ins/outs, start of shift, etc. (Plus only)

You can export end-of-day reports to Excel or integrate transactions with Xero or QuickBooks accounting software.

Customer support and reviews

The Plus subscription includes round-the-clock phone support, while Free only has weekday support (9am-5pm AEST time).

There’s also a help section online, walkthrough videos and articles answering most questions. When you get started with the software, written prompts tell you what to do next, however these could be more elaborate.

Customer reviews are generally good for Square Australia, but there are occasional reports of Square requesting documents as part of security procedures or onboarding. From our own tests, we have not had any problems with Square’s service or payments.

Who is Square for Restaurants best for?

If you’re already using Square for card payments, ecommerce or invoicing – and opening a café, bar or restaurant – it’s a no-brainer to try out Square for Restaurants. The software works smoothly with Square payments and integrates with all your Square activities across multiple locations, but it only works with Square’s card machines (and only on iPad or Square Register).

Most other POS providers charge per tablet licence, which quickly racks up the monthly cost.

That being said, even the Plus plan lacks many advanced features like ingredient-tracking and table reservations, so you’ll need to figure out what features would benefit your establishment and see if Square can meet those criteria.

If you have multiple checkouts at the same location, there’s lots of money to save because the monthly fee covers unlimited iPad licence at the same location.

Most other POS providers charge their subscriptions per tablet licence, which quickly racks up the monthly cost.