Restaurant Managers have loads of responsibilities – to manage employees, maintain an entire kitchen, and be a bookkeeper, all while providing your customers with great food and an unforgettable experience. To do so, they require all the tools that they can get. Fortunately, restaurant management software comes with all the features that can help improve and enhance a restaurant’s business.
Restaurant management software is essentially a POS software that is used to aid in restaurant operations like ordering, billing, inventory management, queue management, and more. This software can be broadly divided into FOH (front of house) and BOH (back of house) software. Using this software to manage aspects of restaurant operations increase efficiency and reduce customer wait times, as well as prevent employee scams.
For restaurants, the development and infrastructural costs are already huge. To make the task of restaurateur’s easier, we have compiled a list of the top free restaurant management software available. With this list, you can be certain that different restaurant processes like billing, sale reporting, and kitchen management are managed efficiently.
Top Open Source Restaurant Management Software
Floreant is the most widely used free and open source POS built for restaurants. It can run on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and it’s totally free to use and distribute. Floreant can run on tablet devices, taking the POS right out to the customers’ tables. It offers a multitude of features like financial information reporting, bar tab keeping, plugins, managing cash terminals, tax computation and preauthorized cards to save customer data.
Floreant connects to kitchen printers, runs a great set of reports, gives managers a set of tools to easily manage menus and recipes. If you’re looking for a free restaurant POS, this could be a great place to start. It comes with a simple installer and an easy to use interface which is helpful for new folks.
Pangea Open POS is one of the top open source restaurant management software. It supports multiple accounts and can run on Windows, Linux, or mobile devices. Pangea can manage kitchen, tables, users, discounts, payments, and inventory at the same time.
Pangea can be easily integrated into printers to manage and print orders. It can take care of all accounting, reporting and employee management which reduces the pressure of the managers. Pangea is suited for small, medium and large business since it has features to work not only on restaurants, bars, and cafes but also for salons, spas, shops, and supermarkets.
UniCenta is a famous open-source POS that was built in 2010 with a mission to provide a powerful, commercial grade software to small and medium enterprises. It supports many features for sales, inventory, supplier, employee and customer management.
UniCenta is available as an on-premise, a self-hosted as well as a cloud-hosted POS system. The interface is user-friendly and can be installed on unlimited terminals with ease.
Top Free Restaurant Management Software
Odoo is an all-in-one POS software with an interface designed for productivity. Odoo is available for free as a web app as well as offline and works across all devices and operating systems. It provides live data from each table in order to maximize the efficiency of the wait staff and also reducing the waiting time for the customers.
Odoo has modules for integrated inventory management. Any stock related transaction can be easily reflected in the inventory module in real-time. This allows checking the availability of any product without wasting any time.
eHopper
eHopper is a popular POS solution with features including contact management, some inventory management, handling tips, and split payments, and employee management. It runs on Windows, Android tablets, and iPads, giving stores a nice range of options. eHopper can easily run a small store end-to-end for free.
The free version only integrates with one credit card processor (A1 Charge) and billing register, support is limited, and you won’t be able to use the system’s employee clock features. As a result, eHopper free version is only suited for small business owners who are limited by their budget but didn’t want to sacrifice quality in their software.
Conclusion
These are the top free and open source restaurant management software which can be used to effectively manage your restaurant. Check them out and choose the one that fits your needs the best.
Alternately, if you are looking for a Hotel Management software, kindly check out SaaSworthy’s list of the best Hotel Management software solutions.
