Qvian for Restaurants & Cafés

How Qvian works for a restaurant or café: floor and table management, kitchen display, menu and recipe costing, QR ordering, delivery, and the daily close — with what to set up first.

For a restaurant, Qvian covers the floor, the kitchen and the books as one system: table sessions and a kitchen display, a menu whose items carry real recipe costs, guests ordering from their own phones, and a daily close that posts the trading day to your accounts. The part that makes it worth the setup is food cost — every dish costed from what you actually paid for its ingredients.

Last updated 24 August 2026

The chain that makes food cost real

Most restaurant systems can tell you what you sold. Far fewer can tell you what it cost you, because that needs an unbroken chain:

Supplier invoice → product with a real cost → ingredient linked to that product → conversion factor → recipe → menu item

Break any link and the dish still shows a food cost — a flatteringly low one, because part of it is missing. That failure mode has a name here: Part-costed. It is the single thing worth understanding before you start.

A green number can be a lie

A recipe with ten ingredients where six carry costs produces a healthy-looking percentage built from 60% of the dish. Treat part-costed items as uncosted. See Food Cost Analysis.

Setting up, in order

How to Set Up a Restaurant in Qvian (restaurant setup, getting started restaurant, new restaurant)

The order matters — each step depends on the one before it.

Required permission: Organization administrator or owner for the first three steps

Create the business unit and enable the modules you need — Restaurant, KDS, Inventory, and Replenishment if you want the purchasing cockpit. See Business Units
Set up roles and people, so waiters, kitchen and managers see only what they should. See Roles & Permissions
Build the floor plan and generate table QR codes. See Table Management
Bring in the menu — type it, or import an existing one. See Menu Migration
Set tax on every item. Use Filter → No tax set in the menu manager and fix them in one bulk action — this is the step most often skipped and the most expensive to fix later
Add recipes for your dishes, and link their ingredients in Kitchen Stock with correct conversion factors
Set up registers so tills can be opened and the day can be closed. See Registers & Reconciliation
Turn on the consumer app listing if you want guests to find you and order at the table. See Consumer app

Result: The restaurant can take orders, the kitchen sees them, dishes carry real costs, and the trading day closes into your accounts.

Note: Do tax before you go live. Items sold without a tax rate are a compliance problem, and fixing it afterwards does not correct sales already made.

How a Restaurant Day Runs (daily routine restaurant, opening and closing, restaurant workflow)

What the day looks like once you are set up.

Open the registers for the tills that will trade
Mark anything you have run out of as Unavailable in the menu manager
Take orders — from the POS, from the staff app, or from guests scanning table QR codes
The kitchen works tickets on the Kitchen Display
Accept or reject incoming delivery and collection orders, throttling kitchen load during a rush
Settle tables, splitting bills where the table asks
Each cashier closes their register with a count
A manager runs the Daily Reconciliation, which posts the day and creates its tax records

Result: The day is closed, the books are posted, and the day's sales are in your tax period.

Note: The reconciliation is not optional bookkeeping — it is what creates output tax records for counter sales. A day never reconciled is missing from your tax return.

What a restaurant uses

Restaurant POS & KDS	Take orders, fire them to kitchen stations, manage ticket and item status.
Table Management	Floor plan, table sessions and status, QR codes for at-table ordering.
Menu Builder	The menu as a ledger — inline price and tax editing, health filters, bulk actions.
Recipes	What each dish is made of and what it yields, built by hand, with AI, or imported.
Kitchen Stock	The ingredient layer that turns purchase prices into recipe costs.
Food Cost Analysis	Cost percentage per dish against a target, and what is driving it.
Bill Splitting	Split evenly or by item into named sub-bills, move and merge tables.
Delivery & Pickup	Accept or reject incoming orders, manage kitchen load, dispatch and hand over.
Consumer app	Guests find you, scan a table QR to order, share a cart and split the bill.
Registers & Reconciliation	Close each till, then close the trading day and post it to the accounts.
Menu Engineering	Which dishes are worth keeping, combining cost with how well they sell.
Buffet Management	Plan, produce, serve and analyse buffet sessions.

If you are a café rather than a full restaurant

A counter-service café does not need ticket statuses moving through a kitchen display in stages. Qvian has a simpler operating mode for this — a status-less kitchen view where items are advanced without the full ticket lifecycle. It is a per-business-unit setting rather than a different product, so you can start simple and turn on more later.

Guides by role

Common questions

Do I have to cost every recipe before going live?

Cause: Costing is what makes the food cost figures meaningful, but it is not required to take orders.

Fix: No. You can trade from day one with an uncosted menu. But until recipes and ingredient links exist, food cost figures are absent or misleading — so do it early rather than never.

Can guests order without an app store download?

Cause: The consumer app is a progressive web app.

Fix: Yes. Guests scan the table QR with their phone camera, the menu opens, and they order. Nothing to install. See Consumer app.

We run several outlets — one system or several?

Cause: Each outlet keeps its own books, stock and reports.

Fix: One organization with a business unit per outlet. Staff can work across several, and balances between units are tracked and settled. See Business Units.

Does the kitchen need its own screen?

Cause: The kitchen display works on any screen, including a phone.

Fix: A tablet or monitor at the pass is typical, but the Kitchen module in the staff app works on a phone. Recipes route dishes to the right station either way.

What happens to a table if guests move?

Cause: The session holds the order, not the table.

Fix: Move the session to the new table so items and bills travel with them. Opening a new table instead strands the original order. See Bill Splitting.