Square POS Vs Square For Restaurants

If you’ve been to a cafe or small restaurant in the past handful of years, the chances are good you’re familiar with Square.

The processing and point of sale juggernaut is a boon for small business owners thanks to the simplicity of its design and its overall affordability.

Square POS is known for its free app, which comes with a free basic card reader along with some fairly robust features for the cost. However, if your business is growing or has some more complex needs, you may find some aspects of the free app lacking.

Fortunately, if you love Square’s processing structure and its interface, you have some additional options.

Square has a pair of advanced platforms geared specifically to retail shops and restaurants. In this post, we’ll focus on what separates Square for Restaurants from the free app.

Square Vs Square Restaurant: Pricing

Obviously, the cost of the free app is just that. It’s one of the best free restaurant POS options, and if all you need is some basic functionality and a swipe card reader, you’re not going to be out of pocket much at all. Square for Restaurants also has a free plan that comes with basic menu and table management, basic reporting, and a handful of other features. Its Plus Plan costs $60/month plus $40/month for each additional device on location.

With Plus, you’ll get access to more features that can help more advanced or full-service restaurants, like order-ready texts, seat management, floor plan customizations, and shift reports. Finally, Square For Restaurant’s Essentials Bundles is $192/month and, as you might guess, has even more advanced features, including a branded website, QR code ordering, and discounts on things like Square Payroll. You will also play a slightly reduced processing fee on online orders. With Square, you get access to a free online store that is easy to set up.

Hardware Compatibility

Square For Restaurants is now compatible with all of Square’s proprietary hardware options, including its mobile card processor, Square Terminal, and its all-in-one countertop device, Square Register. You can also use Square’s Kitchen Display System on an unlimited number of devices with any of Square For Restaurant’s paid plans, and it will cost you $20/month per device with the free plan.

Square Vs Square For Restaurants: Interface

Both Square and Square for Restaurants are cloud-based, storing all of your information on remote servers that you can access on your device. Both feature an offline mode that allows you to store encrypted card information and take payments, processing them when an internet connection is restored.

Square for Restaurants carries over its simple and intuitive design to the restaurant world. Its table layout and management features are basic, with easy color coding that should be a snap for servers and hostesses to navigate. Common functions, like check splitting, can be done with just a few taps, and there is tableside ordering functionality to improve efficiency. You can also add and customize items with both products, send digital receipts, and receive and respond to customer feedback.

A few unique features also exist, such as the ability to change the lighting on the tablets depending on your restaurant’s preferred ambiance. The interface is also fully customizable, allowing you to change the floor plan of your business or the color coding system easily. Its mechanism for modifications is also extremely intuitive, walking servers through the steps quickly.

Square Vs Square For Restaurants: Features

The free Square app gives you a solid starter pack of features, and if your business has a limited number of employees or a small number of tables, it will probably be more than functional. Both products allow you to view your inventory in real-time and automatically build a customer database. Square for Restaurants adds just a handful of other touches to expand its scope and make its product viable for small to mid-sized full-service restaurants.

• Menu Creation: Square for Restaurants allows you to build menus at any time and split them by time of day.
• Floor Plans: You can lay out your restaurant according to your own specifications and track covers.
• Modifiers: A nice feature to have that is missing from the free app is the ability to take orders through conversational ordering and forced modifiers, taking guesswork away from your servers.
• Tips: For a large number of employees, Square for Restaurants lets you settle batch transactions and tips.
• Reports: Square for Restaurants has slightly more advanced reports, allowing you to generate cover, menu, labor, and revenue center lists.
• Customer Service: The free app only provides you with limited hours for direct customer service, but with Square for Restaurants, you get 24/7 technical support.

Square For Restaurants: Free Plan Vs Plus Plan

If you’ve decided to go with Square for Restaurants but are now debating whether to upgrade to its paid plan, let’s try to make things a little easier for you. Here are the highlights from each plan.

Free Plan:

• Menu management
• Table management
• Aut0-gratuity (not including party-size thresholds)
• Advanced discounts
• Auto 86-ing
• Customizable ticket layouts
• Reports

Plus Plan: Includes everything in free plan plus:

• Order-ready texts
• Reopen closed checks
• Seat management
• Course management
• Shift reports
• Menu reports
• Teams Plus and Shifts Plus included

Final Thoughts

If you like simplicity and you’re looking for an affordable, no-frills POS system, you’re going to like Square. The free app is one of our top POS systems for small businesses and comes with plenty of things that you just won’t find anywhere else without having to pay a monthly fee and its processing rates are competitive and upfront. It is tailor-made for cafes or small, single-room restaurants, giving you the ability to turn over customers quickly and throwing in some bonus inventory and reporting features.

Square for Restaurants opens the doors to larger restaurants that need a little more organization. Its free version gives you enough features to probably make it worth your while if you own any kind of food-service establishment, and its paid plans make it an option for pretty much everyone short of large-scale chains. Starting at $60 a month, it’s still very competitive with other similar restaurant POS products.