Restaurant management software, built for the Maldives

Most restaurant software is written for places where the internet is a utility. In the Maldives it is a service that comes and goes, and that single fact reorders the whole requirements list. A system that is excellent at everything else and stops selling during an outage has failed at the only job that cannot wait.

The second fact is distance. Stock arrives by boat on a schedule you do not control, which makes a stockout expensive in a way it is not on a mainland — the replacement is not a van away. So knowing what you actually have, and what each plate costs to make, stops being back-office hygiene and becomes the thing that decides whether a menu is profitable.

The third is that one operator often runs very different rooms: a café, a restaurant and room service can sit under one company with one accountant and one tax return. Software that assumes a single shop turns that into three systems and a spreadsheet to reconcile them.

The counter is offline-first by design. Orders, payments and kitchen tickets keep flowing through an outage and reconcile when the connection returns. A register session opens with a float, records every movement, and closes with a counted drawer and a supervisor-approved close, so the day is accounted for whether or not the internet was there for it. Sales sessions

Cash is counted note by note rather than typed as a total, and the variance between expected and counted is recorded rather than absorbed — which is what makes a difference investigable the next morning instead of a mystery. Cash handling

A table can split a bill by item or by share, and a single bill can be settled across cash, card and bank transfer together. Bill splits and split payments

Orders land in the kitchen as they are placed, routed to the station that cooks them, timed, and tracked to the pass. Item-level tracking matters more than it sounds: a kitchen cooks a table in parallel, so a system that only knows whether a whole order is done cannot tell the grill it is behind while the fryer is waiting. Kitchen display system

Where a printed ticket is still wanted, tickets split across kitchen printers automatically, so the bar never receives the grill's dockets. Kitchen order tickets

The floor is a plan of your actual room, with tables coloured by how long guests have been waiting, rather than a list of table numbers to memorise. Dine-in and table management

Your own ordering site, not a marketplace: guests browse, cart and pay without creating an account, and the order arrives in the same queue as everything else. Delivery-only and dine-in-only items filter themselves out so nobody orders a dish that cannot travel. Online ordering

A QR code on the table or the receipt takes a guest straight to the menu, and a group can add to one shared cart from their own phones. QR codes on the bill

Delivery is in-house rather than brokered — the rider works from the same order record, and the guest stays your customer. Deliveries

A recipe tells the system what goes into a dish and how much. When that dish sells, the ingredients come off stock automatically and the sale carries its real food cost. Without recipes, stock only moves when someone receives a delivery or adjusts a number by hand — which is the state most restaurants are actually in. Recipes and ingredients

Counts, waste, breakage and transfers between stores are recorded as what they were, so a month-end difference has a history instead of a shrug. Inventory, adjustments and transfers

Purchasing runs ordered → received → billed, so stock does not rise by magic and you can see what is owed to whom across any date range. Suppliers and purchase orders

Items that fall below their threshold collect on a reorder list with a priority and a supplier, and selected lines become a purchase order or a supplier email in one step. Shopping list

Foodops ships Zero (0%) and GST (8%, the default); you add any other rate you are registered for, and each item carries its own. Output tax on sales and input tax on purchases are tracked separately, and the Input and Output Tax Statements are the filing preparation. Changing a rate affects future transactions only — past orders keep the rate they were rung at, so last quarter's reports do not rewrite themselves. Foodops produces the figures; you or your accountant file them. Taxes — GST setup and input/output tax

Day summaries, sales registers, outstanding invoices and stock aging come from the same records as the sale, which is the point — a report that is assembled separately is a second version of the truth. Reports catalogue

The day closes with a summary that exports to a spreadsheet, including sessions, payments, denominations and variances. End-of-day report

Outlets carry their own menus, pricing and reporting and roll up to a single back office, so a group can compare rooms without exporting anything. Outlets

Roles are distinct rather than decorative — owner, administrator, manager, counter, waiter, kitchen, purchasing and accounting each carry their own permissions, and every action is attributed. Users, roles and permissions

Several registers can run in one outlet at once, each with its own session, float and close. Sales registers

The useful questions are the ones a demo does not answer by itself. Ask what the till does with no internet — not whether it is "cloud-based", but what a cashier sees and whether a sale can complete. Ask whether stock moves when a dish is sold, or only when someone edits a number. Ask which report your accountant will actually use for the GST return, and have someone open it.

Ask where support sits and in which time zone, because a kitchen problem at 8pm on a Friday is not an email. Ask what happens to historical figures when a price or a tax rate changes — a system that rewrites the past makes every earlier report unciteable. And ask what leaving looks like: which of your own data you can export, in what format, without asking permission.

Two shapes of product tend to fail these questions in predictable ways. A cloud-only till is usually excellent until the line drops, and then it is nothing. An imported system built for another market will often do everything competently except the part that is local — the tax treatment, the currency you report in, and a support number that answers during your service.