Restaurants & Food Service
Tables, Captain Order, kitchen routing and recipe cost per dish.
Restaurants and cafés do not sell the way a shop counter does. Orders belong to tables, not to a queue. Waiters take them away from the till. Some are booked days in advance, some arrive by phone, and a single bill accumulates over an evening across several rounds. Nama ERP's point of sale handles that shape of business directly — table service, reservations, phone and online orders, and a waiter app — on the same system that holds your inventory and your accounts.
The modules this sector leans on
Shared with every other Nama customer — configured for how you work.
- Point of Sale — Registers That Keep Selling Offline Retail terminals that keep selling offline, on a local database, with shift control.
- Inventory Management — Quantity, Value and Where It Actually Is Multi-warehouse stock, batches, serials, stocktakes and the cost behind every movement.
- Purchasing — Request, Compare, Order, Receive, Match Requests, quotations, purchase orders and receipts, priced with landed cost.
- Ledger Chart of accounts, journals, cost centres and the financial statements built on them.
- Payroll — A Salary You Can Explain, Line by Line Salary structures, allowances, deductions, a payroll run that posts itself to the ledger, and the bank file that pays it.
- E-Commerce Integration — Salla, Zid, Magento, Shopify and Amazon Online stores and marketplaces kept in step with stock, prices and orders.
What the system does
A floor you can read at a glance
Seating is organised into halls and the tables within them. The table viewer shows every table as a button coloured by status: free and ready to seat, busy with its invoice code showing, or reserved for a booking. Open a table and its order loads onto the sales screen; order another round and it joins the same running bill; settle at the tender screen and the table returns to free.
Reservations with deposits
A reservation holds a table for a future booking and can take a deposit — customer, date and time, any pre-ordered items, and the amount paid. While it stands, the table shows as reserved and cannot be given to a walk-in. When the guests arrive, the deposit is credited against the final bill. If the booking falls through, a cancellation records the reason, handles any refund or cancellation fee, and frees the table.
Phone orders routed to the branch that will cook them
Any register can run as a call-centre station. The operator takes the order, picks the destination branch or machine, and suspends it instead of taking payment — which sends it there. The destination machine checks for incoming orders about once a minute, pops up a notification, and the order appears in its list ready to complete as a normal sale.
The whole order travels — items, quantities, prices, customer details, notes and discounts — and the system retries if the network hiccups. For delivery operations and centralised order intake across several branches, this is the difference between one phone line and one system.
Held orders that follow the customer
An order held on one register can be recalled on another, so a customer is not tied to the till that first served them.
Online orders
Orders arriving from online channels can be looked up by customer with their status — pending, processing, ready, delivered, cancelled — then opened, fulfilled and paid for if payment has not already been taken.
Captain Order — the waiter’s app
Captain Order puts the order pad on a phone or tablet, sharing the same items, favourites and tables as the register. A waiter opens a table, taps favourites for speed, picks add-ons where an item has them, and sends the order — it lands at the register and the kitchen immediately. More rounds go to the same table through the evening, all accumulating on the bill, settled at a register when the guests leave.
Where it fits
This is one part of Nama POS, which also covers shifts and cash control, returns and replacements, fingerprint login, offline data sync and inventory operations at the branch. Because it is the same system, an evening’s covers reduce stock and hit the ledger without an interface in between.
Read the restaurant and tables documentation or the full POS module.
Every screen, field and setting is documented in full.
Read the documentation →Good question — already answered
Does the waiter app work on a normal phone?
Captain Order runs on a handheld and sends the order from the table straight to the kitchen, so the waiter does not walk to a till to enter it and the kitchen does not read handwriting.
Can a phone order be routed to a specific branch?
Yes. A call-centre order is routed to the branch that will actually cook and deliver it, which is what keeps a multi-branch brand from cooking the same order twice or not at all.
Does the till keep working if the internet drops?
Yes. Nama POS is a desktop application with a local database, so service continues through an outage and synchronises when the connection returns.
Companies already running Nama ERP
When I joined the company I found that the system in use was Namasoft's, but it was not fully operational — parts of it were not working. I took on the challenge, we surfaced every problem in it, and within six months it was running and the system had been configured to match the way we work.
Get started with Nama today
Tell us how your business runs and we will show you how Nama ERP fits it — in your language, on your infrastructure.