Restaurant POS and online ordering in Bangladesh

A restaurant system is judged at eight in the evening, when the floor is full, the kitchen is behind and the internet has dropped. Most of the feature lists you will be shown are irrelevant at that moment. Three things matter: that orders keep going in, that the kitchen sees them, and that the bill is right.

Updated 19 September 2026

The short version

Offline-first is the single most important property of a POS here. If it stops working when the connection does, it is not fit for the room.
Your own online ordering sits alongside the delivery apps rather than replacing them — the apps bring new customers, your own site keeps the regulars without commission.
The kitchen display matters more than the tablet. Orders lost between the floor and the pass are the actual daily cost.
Get the VAT and receipt requirements confirmed by your own VAT consultant, then build to that. It is not a thing to assume.

What the system has to do on the floor

Take an order without a round trip

Orders are entered on the floor and must be recorded instantly, whether or not the connection is up at that second. The system stores locally and syncs when it can. Anything that waits for a server before it acknowledges a dish will be abandoned by your waiters within a week.

Get it to the kitchen unambiguously

A kitchen display, or a printer at the pass, with the table, the course and the modifications. This is where most money is lost — not in the software, in the order that never arrived.

Handle the awkward real cases

Splitting a bill six ways, moving a table, adding a dish after the bill is printed, a discount the manager approves, a void with a reason attached. These are not edge cases; they are Thursday.

Close the day honestly

Cash counted against cash recorded, card and mobile settlements reconciled, voids and discounts visible by staff member. The day close is what turns the POS from a cash register into something you can manage from.

Online ordering on your own site

The delivery apps are good at one thing: putting you in front of somebody who has not eaten with you before. That is worth paying commission for. What is not worth paying commission for is the customer who already knows your name, searches for it, and lands on the app because you gave them nowhere else to go.

An ordering page on your own site, with your own menu, taking payment by card, bKash or Nagad and printing straight to the kitchen, costs you the gateway percentage instead of the app's commission. The regulars move over quickly once they know it exists — a card in the delivery bag does more than any advertising.

It also gives you something the apps will never give you: the customer's order history, in your own database, so you know who your regulars actually are.

Stock, waste and the things owners ask about later

Recipe-level stock deduction — a plate of biryani reducing rice, meat and oil — is what makes wastage visible. It is also the feature most often bought and least often used, because it only works if goods-in is recorded honestly every single day.

Our advice is to launch without it and add it once the floor operation is stable and somebody owns the stock process. A half-maintained inventory is worse than none, because people start trusting numbers that are wrong.

VAT, receipts and multiple branches

VAT rules for restaurants in Bangladesh differ by category and change from time to time, and whether you are required to issue receipts through an approved fiscal device depends on your own registration. Do not take a software vendor's word for what applies to you, including ours. Get it confirmed by your VAT consultant, in writing, and we will build the receipt and reporting side to match exactly what they specify.

For more than one branch, decide early whether branches share a menu and prices or set their own, and whether an owner should be able to see all branches in one screen. Retrofitting multi-branch onto a single-branch system is expensive; designing for it at the start costs almost nothing.

Questions we get asked

Should I buy an off-the-shelf POS or have one built?+

If you have one branch and a standard menu, off-the-shelf is usually the right call — it is cheaper and it works on Monday. Building makes sense when you have several branches, an unusual operation, or you want ordering, loyalty and your website to be one system rather than three that do not talk.

Will it work when the internet goes down?+

It must. Anything we build for a restaurant floor records orders locally and syncs afterwards. If you are evaluating someone else's system, ask them to unplug the router during the demonstration.

Can it print to my existing kitchen printer?+

Usually yes. Thermal printers are largely standard, and it is worth confirming the model before the build rather than buying new hardware you did not budget for.

What about foodpanda orders — do they come into the same screen?+

Aggregator orders arriving in the POS instead of on a separate tablet is possible and is worth asking about, because a second screen at the pass is how orders get missed. It depends on what integration the aggregator currently offers, so treat it as a question to confirm rather than an assumption.

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