Restaurant POS with QR table ordering

The context

A tea shop running both dine-in table service and takeaway counter sales. Orders were taken verbally, relayed to the counter, and billed manually. Two specific problems made off-the-shelf POS software a poor fit.

First, the same item sells at two different prices depending on whether it's served at a table or taken away — and that difference applies per item, not as a blanket rule. Most POS products treat price as a single field.

Second, staff time was going into order relay rather than preparation, particularly at peak hours when the gap between a customer deciding and the counter hearing about it was longest.

What we built

QR ordering per table. Each table gets its own printed QR tent. Scanning it opens that specific table's live cart — the customer browses the menu by category, sees prep time per item, and orders without waiting for someone to come over. The admin can add or remove tables and regenerate or re-download the QR set as print-ready PDFs at any time.

Dual pricing per item. Every product carries both a dine-in and a takeaway price. The system applies the correct one automatically based on how the order was placed, so the price shown to the customer and the price on the bill always agree.

Full product management. Categories, images, availability status, prep-time labels and manual display ordering — so the shop controls exactly what appears on the menu and in what sequence, without a developer.

Counter POS. A staff-side cart for walk-in and phone orders, running against the same catalogue and the same order stream as the QR orders.

Bluetooth thermal receipt printing. Bills print to a physical thermal printer paired directly from the browser over Web Bluetooth/USB — no separate desktop POS application and no installed print driver.

Back office. Order history, printed-bill audit trail with reprints, customer feedback capture, user accounts with roles, and a dashboard covering revenue, order counts and top-selling items.

The technically interesting part

Printing to a thermal receipt printer from a web application is uncommon — most systems solve it with an installed desktop application acting as a print bridge. Doing it over Web Bluetooth/USB directly from the browser removed that entire layer, which meant no per-machine installation, no driver maintenance, and one less thing to break on a busy evening.

What we can and can't claim

The system is live and in daily use. We haven't published before-and-after figures for order times or revenue, because we don't have measured baseline data from before the system existed — and we'd rather say that than quote a number we can't stand behind.

What we can say concretely: table orders now reach the counter the moment a customer places them, bills print without a separate POS terminal, and dine-in versus takeaway pricing no longer depends on anyone remembering which rate applies.

Related

If you run a restaurant, café or cloud kitchen, see restaurant software. For the broader billing side, see billing & invoicing software.