The café POS setup that runs the whole floor: tills, kitchen screens, tables, and margins
A café isn't one workflow, it's four running at once: the till, the kitchen, the floor, and the back office. The setups that feel calm on a Saturday are the ones where all four run on the same system — here's how to build that, screen by screen.
Wemu Team
Product
Walk into a stressed café and you can usually spot the cause without tasting anything: dockets shouted to the kitchen, a till that doesn't know table 6 exists, a manager doing refunds with a shared password, and an owner who finds out the flat white margin shrank three weeks after the milk price moved. None of those are people problems. They're system problems.
Setup tutorial: four screens, one brain
Step 1 — The till (Cashier view)
Load your menu with categories, modifiers, and prices. Every staff member gets a personal PIN — one iPad serves the whole team, and every sale, refund, and drawer-open is attributed to a person, not "the register".
Step 2 — The kitchen screen (KDS)
Set a second device to Kitchen view and route categories to stations — coffee to the bar screen, food to the kitchen. Tickets arrive the moment the till or a QR order fires. Each dish is individually tappable: bump items as they're ready instead of pretending the whole ticket finishes at once, and long-press to un-bump when the runner brought it back.
Step 3 — The floor (tables)
Floor view shows your rooms and tables — seat guests, send rounds to the kitchen, and take payment at the table. Settling folds tips in, records the payment, and frees the table automatically. QR ordering slots into the same flow if you want guests ordering from their phones.
Step 4 — Guardrails (manager approvals)
Pick which actions need a manager: refunds, voids, drawer-opens without a sale, discounts over a threshold, price changes. When staff hit one, the screen shows the managers on shift — they pick who's approving, that person enters their own PIN, and the audit log records who approved what for whom. New hires are safe by default; the override takes five seconds.
Step 5 — Margins that update themselves
Give each menu item its ingredient cost and let stock count down as you sell. Now the dashboard answers the questions that matter: what did this week actually cost, which dishes carry the margin, where is waste showing up — while the week is still fixable. Rosters sit next to takings so labour percentage isn't a month-end surprise.
Why Wemu fits cafés better than a big-name POS
| Typical POS stack | Wemu |
|---|---|
| POS + KDS + rosters + inventory = four subscriptions | One system, one flat price, unlimited staff |
| Whole-ticket bump | Per-dish bumps with station routing — the bar isn't blocked by the kitchen |
| Refunds behind a shared manager code | Named manager approvals with a full audit trail |
| Food cost in a spreadsheet | Live margins from ingredient costs and stock that counts itself down |
| Hardware lock-in | Runs on the iPads you own; Tap to Pay on iPhone for the counter |
Where the giants still win: a 200-cover fine-diner with coursing, seat-level ordering, and a sommelier workflow will find deeper hospitality-specific depth in a dedicated enterprise product. For the café, the brunch spot, and the casual 60-seater — the four screens above are the whole operation.
Run the whole floor on one system
Till, kitchen screens, tables, approvals, and live margins — one flat plan, unlimited staff. 7-day free trial.
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