The Friendly
Field Guide
What's inside
- Part 1 · The Big Picture
- What Sufrati is · The two screens · Who can do what · One full day, narrated
- Part 2 · How Everything Fits Together
- From restaurant down to drawer · The money rule · Two currencies, one truth
- Part 3 · Learn the Language
- Every term, one plain sentence, one real example
- Part 4 · The Office, Page by Page
- Dashboards · Menu · Recipes · Stock · Buying · Bookings · Guests · Money · People · Settings
- Part 5 · The Till, Screen by Screen
- Floor · Ordering · Kitchen · Paying · Splitting · The drawer · Shifts · Guest display · The door
- Part 6 · What Your Guests See
- The QR menu · Calling a waiter · Feedback · The staff time clock
- Part 7 · Recipes for Every Day
- Open up · Seat & serve · Split a bill · Refund · Count stock · Receive stock · Close down
- Part 8 · Follow the Money
- A dollar's journey · Tax · Giveaways · Over & short · Reading your day
- Part 9 · Make It Yours, Then Grow
- Arabic in one tap · Your logo & colours · Opening branch two
- Appendix A · A–Z Glossary
- Appendix B · When Something Looks Wrong
- Appendix C · Role Cheat-Sheet
Parts 1 to 3 build the picture in your head. Read them in order, with coffee. Parts 4 to 6 are a map you can open anywhere. Part 7 is pure "do this, then this." And whenever a word puzzles you, flip to the glossary at the back. That's the whole method.
The Big Picture
So what is Sufrati, really?
Picture everything that happens in your restaurant on a busy night. A guest sits down. Someone takes the order. The kitchen cooks it. Ingredients leave the shelf. Money enters the drawer. Numbers land in a report. Normally, that's five different apps taped together, and you're the tape.
Sufrati is all of it in one system. The tablet at the counter, the ticket printer in the kitchen, the cash in the drawer, the stock in the storeroom, the bookings at the door, the guest scanning a QR code, and the report you read in bed. One brain. So when a waiter rings up a shawarma, the kitchen hears about it, the chickpeas tick down, the money is counted, and your dashboard updates. Nobody types anything twice. Nothing falls between the cracks.
Because everything is connected, you enter things once. Add a dish to the menu and it shows up on the till, the guest's phone, the kitchen ticket, the cost report. Change its price and it changes everywhere, instantly. That's the magic trick behind the whole platform, and it never gets old.
The two screens you'll live on
Here's the simplest mental model in this book. Sufrati has two faces, and knowing which one you're looking at removes 90% of all confusion.
| The till (POS) | The office (Back office) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | /pos, on a tablet at the counter or in a pocket | /app, on the laptop in the office |
| Who's on it | Waiters, cashiers, hosts, cooks. During service. | Owners, managers, accountants, stock people. Before and after service. |
| What it's for | Doing tonight: seating, ordering, firing, paying | Setting up and looking back: menu, prices, stock, staff, reports |
| Personality | Big buttons. Fast. Forgives a shaky internet moment. | Detailed. Everything in a sidebar. Made for thinking. |
Serving someone right now? You're on the till. Setting up or reviewing? You're in the office. And you can hop between them any time: the till has an Office button, the office has an Open POS button. Same door, both directions.
Roles: who gets which keys
Everyone who signs in has a role. Think of a role as a keyring. You don't hand people individual keys for individual doors; you hand them the ring for their job, and the right doors just open.
| Role | Their keyring opens… |
|---|---|
| Owner | The whole building. Money, staff, menu, reports. |
| Manager | The day itself. Menu, scheduling, discounts, dashboards. Not the deepest money settings. |
| Captain | The floor. Seating, assigning waiters, moving and merging tables. |
| Waiter / Cashier | Orders and payments at the table and counter. |
| Host | The front door. Bookings and the walk-in waitlist. |
| Accountant | The books. Sales, tax, expenses, end-of-day reports. |
| Kitchen roles | Their station's tickets. Chef, Grill Cook, Bartender, and friends. |
| Inventory / Stock | The storeroom. Counting, receiving, waste, reordering. |
| Developer | The wiring. Floor design, feature switches, accounts, permissions. Locked down on purpose. |
A few screens could quietly break the business if someone poked them mid-service, like redesigning the floor plan or reassigning roles. Sufrati keeps those behind the Developer key, and money and staff settings behind Owner + Developer only. So if even an Owner hits a locked door once in a while, that's the system protecting you, not failing you.
You hire Laura as a waiter. Create her account, give her the Waiter role, done. She signs into the till with a PIN and can take orders and payments tonight. She can't see profits or edit the menu, and that's exactly right. Promote her later? Add Captain to her keyring and table management unlocks itself. No other setup.
One full day, narrated
Follow one day and you'll meet every big idea in the platform. The bold words are terms you'll master in Part 3.
- Morning. The manager signs into a till and opens a shift: count the starting cash, confirm it, trading begins. The kitchen printers stretch and wake up.
- A guest walks in. The host seats them at Table 12 on the floor map. Or the guest skips the wait entirely and scans the QR code on the table to browse the menu on their phone.
- The order. The waiter taps dishes, adds a "no onions" modifier, and fires. A kitchen ticket appears at exactly the right station: skewers at the grill, lemonade at the bar.
- Meanwhile, silently. The dish's recipe tells Sufrati what ingredients just got used, and stock ticks down on its own. Nobody counts a chickpea.
- The payment. Cash and card, maybe a split bill, maybe a coupon. The drawer pops, the sale is recorded, the guest waves goodbye.
- Night. The manager closes the shift and counts the drawer. Sufrati compares the count to what it expected and prints the Z-report: sales, tax, tips, and whether the cash adds up. The owner opens the office and the whole day is already there, summarized.
That's it. That's the machine. Everything else in this book is just a closer look at one of those six moments.
How Everything Fits Together
From big to small
Sufrati organizes your world like nesting boxes. Open each one and the next is inside:
| Box | What it holds | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant | Your whole business. Everything you own lives here, invisible to every other business on the platform. | "Aal View Restaurant" |
| Branch | One physical location. Stock, tills, and staff belong to a branch. | "Aley branch" |
| Room | An area inside a branch, drawn on the floor plan. | "Terrace", "Shisha section" |
| Table | A spot guests sit at. Has a number, seats, and its own permanent QR code. | Table 101, 6 seats |
| Terminal | A device signed into the till, with its own printers and drawer. | "Front counter iPad" |
| Till / Drawer | The cash box itself. Where the money rule lives (next section). | Drawer 1 |
Then relax: Sufrati hides multi-branch machinery until you actually need it. Tools like Stock transfers (moving goods between branches) stay out of your sidebar while you have one branch. If you can't find a feature, you may simply not need it yet.
The money rule (read this twice)
Here's the rule that confuses new operators most, so let's make it unforgettable:
Not the kitchen screen. Not the reservations desk. Not a manager's dashboard. Those can look and organize all they like, but the moment money changes hands can only happen at a drawer with an open shift. Every dollar is always tied to a specific drawer, a specific person, a specific window of time.
A captain can seat the table, take the order, even print the bill. But "the guest paid $40 cash"? That moment needs a till with an open shift. Annoying? Slightly. But when $20 goes missing, you'll know exactly whose drawer, whose shift, and which hour to ask about. That trade is worth it every single day.
Two currencies, one truth
Some restaurants take payment in two currencies with wildly different sizes. Sufrati keeps that sane with two simple ideas:
- Native currency: what's physically inside a given drawer. One drawer might hold dollars, another the local currency.
- Base currency: the single currency your reports speak, so the owner always sees one honest number.
A guest owes the equivalent of $40. They hand 20 US dollars to one drawer and the rest in local pounds to another, at today's rate. Each drawer counts its own pile at closing time. The sale still books as exactly $40 of revenue. Drawers count natively; the business thinks in base. Both are true at once.
A report line saying "$0.00" for one drawer might just mean that drawer had a quiet night, not that the restaurant did. Always check whether you're reading one drawer or the whole business.
Shifts: the day's container
A shift is simply the stretch between opening a till and closing it. Think of it as a sealed envelope around a period of trading:
- Opening writes the starting cash on the envelope.
- Every sale, refund, and drawer movement during the shift goes inside it.
- Closing counts what's in the drawer, compares it to what should be there, and shows the difference, called the variance. Then it prints the Z-report.
They answer one question forever: "who had the drawer, from when to when, and did the money add up?" Without shifts a missing $20 is a mystery novel. With shifts it's a one-page memo.
Learn the Language
Orders & the kitchen
Everything one table (or one takeaway) is having, gathered in one place. It grows as they order and stays open until they pay.
The order turned into money: items, prices, tax, total. "Bill" is what the guest calls it; "invoice" is the same thing inside the system.
The kitchen's copy: what to cook, how many, for which table. No prices on it. Cooks don't need prices.
Table 12 orders two grilled chicken and a lemonade. The order now holds three lines. You fire it, and two KOTs appear: "2× Grilled Chicken" at the grill, "1× Lemonade" at the bar. Later the invoice prices those same three lines with tax. Same meal, three views: yours, the kitchen's, the guest's.
Fire means "kitchen, start now." Hold means "stay on the order, but don't cook yet." That's how dessert waits politely while mains are still on the grill.
A spot in the kitchen where certain dishes land: Grill, Bar, Cold Prep, Saj. Each station gets its own printed ticket or its own screen. You choose which menu categories go where, once.
Map "Mashawi" to the Grill station and "Drinks" to the Bar. From then on, every skewer prints at the grill and every juice at the bar, automatically, forever. The waiter never thinks about routing again. And if a station has no printer? Items fall back to the default printer, so nothing ever vanishes silently.
Edit a line you already fired (extra cheese, one more portion) and the kitchen gets a small ticket marked CHANGE, so cooks instantly see what's new instead of puzzling over a duplicate order.
Void removes one item before payment; cancel kills the whole order. Both print a ticket to the kitchen so no one cooks a ghost, and any stock already deducted walks itself back onto the shelf.
Tables, the floor & the door
Your dining room as a live map on the till. Every table is a tile; a small dot tells you its state: free, seated, ordering, food served, or asking for the check.
The floor plan editor, a Developer tool. A design canvas with a real-metre grid where you draw rooms, tables, walls, doors, and equipment, so the map on screen matches the room your feet are in.
A promise for later: a name, a party size, a time.
People standing at the door right now, waiting for a table. Add a name, quote a wait, seat them when something frees up.
A family of four walks in on a packed Friday. The host taps Add party, types "Khalil, 4", quotes 15 minutes. When Table 8 clears, one tap seats them. The floor flips the table to "seated" and the waiter takes it from there. No paper list, no shouting.
The menu
A menu is a named list of what you sell (you can keep several: "Lunch", "Ramadan"). A menu item is one sellable thing on it: name, price, photo, category.
A group of items, like Cold Mezze or Desserts. Categories organize the menu and steer the kitchen, because a category can point at a station.
A choice or add-on riding on an item: "no onions", "extra cheese +$1", "well done". Some are optional; some are required, meaning the guest must pick before the item can be added.
"Shawarma Plate" carries a required "Choose your sauce" (garlic / spicy / none) and an optional "+Extra meat $3". A guest picks spicy and extra meat. The kitchen ticket says so, the bill grows by $3, and the modifier follows the item everywhere it goes: the guest display, the receipt, even a refund later.
A one-off line you type by hand, name and price, for the odd request that isn't on the menu and never will be.
Kitchen slang for "we're out." Mark a dish 86 and it hides from every menu, till and phone alike, until you bring it back. It even un-86es itself automatically when the last shift of the day closes.
Recipes & stock
The ingredient list behind one serving of a dish, plus a little waste allowance. It's the bridge that turns "we sold a hummus" into "we used 150g of chickpeas."
What you physically have on the shelf. Sufrati keeps a running ledger: everything in, minus everything out, equals what's there. Always.
Hummus = 150g chickpeas + 30g tahini + 20ml lemon. Sell one, and exactly that much leaves stock. Sell forty on a Friday and forty portions' worth leaves. Your chickpea count in the office is live all night, and nobody ever counted a jar.
A batch is one delivery lot with its own expiry date. FEFO means First Expired, First Out: the oldest-expiring stock gets used first, and anything already expired is locked away from sale entirely.
A walk through the storeroom writing down what's actually there. Sufrati compares your count to what it expected and books the difference. This is how spoilage and sticky fingers get caught.
Recording what got thrown away and why: dropped, burnt, spoiled. Waste you record is a cost you can see and fix. Waste you don't record just quietly eats your profit.
A PO is your shopping list sent to a supplier. Receiving it books the goods onto your shelf at the price you paid, raising stock and keeping your costs honest.
A low-water mark per ingredient. Dip below it and the item appears in Reorder alerts, where one tap drafts POs grouped by supplier.
The running average of what you've paid for an ingredient, nudged every time you receive more. It's the number behind recipe costs and stock value.
A ranking of stock by value. A items hold the first 80% of your money, B the next 15%, C the crumbs. Watch the A shelf like a hawk; glance at C monthly.
Money, payment & perks
Payment is settling the bill. A tender is one way money arrived: cash, card, gift card. One bill can mix several tenders.
One table, several payers. Split evenly, by item ("I only had the salad"), or by custom amounts.
Tendered is what the guest handed you. Kept is what stays after change. $50 tendered on a $42 bill: $8 back, $42 kept.
Money going back after a sale, in full or in part. Sufrati reverses the right share of tax and discount, backs out loyalty points, and returns the stock. And it caps the total, so you can never refund more than was actually paid.
A discount lowers a bill. A coupon is a code the guest brings to earn one. A promotion is a deal that applies itself at checkout when its rules match, like buy-one-get-one.
Bill: $50. The guest shows coupon WELCOME10 for 10% off. Sufrati trims the pre-tax subtotal, recalculates tax, and the guest pays the smaller total. The $5 you gave away is logged, so at month's end you know exactly how generous you were.
Points a guest earns per amount spent, at a rate you choose. They pile up on the guest's profile for rewards.
Money paid now, spent later. Selling one brings cash in today; redeeming one is just another tender drawing the balance down.
Additive tax is added on top at the till ("+11%"). Inclusive tax hides inside the shelf price. Sufrati knows which game you're playing, so tax is never charged twice.
Tips gathered into one pot and shared by a rule you set, instead of everyone keeping their own.
Devices & guest-facing things
A second screen turned toward the guest, showing their order build up in real time. Trust, printed in pixels.
Every table wears a permanent QR code. Guests scan it and get your menu on their phone: photos, prices, a Call-waiter button, a Request-bill button, and (where you allow it) ordering itself.
Two ways for the kitchen to hear: a live screen of tickets, or paper from a printer. Pick per station. The screen says "Kitchen is caught up" when there's nothing to cook, which is the nicest sentence in the building.
A kiosk where staff tap their own face to clock in and out. Hours flow straight into the People dashboard and payroll.
The little electric nudge that pops the cash drawer open when cash is due. That satisfying ka-chunk? That's a drawer kick.
The Office, Page by Page
The parts that never move
- Left sidebar: every tool, in groups. Home, Floor, Menu, Inventory, Finance, settings. Wherever you are is highlighted.
- Top bar: a global Search or jump to… box (press
Ctrl/⌘ Kand fly anywhere), the language globe, a sun/moon theme toggle, notifications, and Open POS. - You, bottom-left: your name, your role, and the way out.
The sidebar shows only what your role can use, and hides tools you don't need yet. So when a teammate says "I don't have that page," the answer is almost always their role, not a bug.
Home: the dashboards
Overview answers "how are we doing right now?" in five seconds: money in, orders, average order, discounts, tax. My work is your personal list. People shows headcount and who's on the clock at this minute. Managers and accountants get their own focused dashboards too.
The discounts figure is already net of refunds. When money comes back, the number doesn't lie to you.
Menu & recipes
- Menu: build everything you sell. Items, photos, categories, modifiers, availability, and the 86 switch for "we ran out."
- 3-D dish scan: capture a dish in 3-D for a menu that makes guests point.
- Recipes: the ingredients behind each dish. A banner counts "items sold with no recipe" so you can close the gap.
- Stations: create kitchen stations, route categories to them, choose print or screen.
- Promotions: coupons and self-applying deals, plus an audit of every discount given.
- Menu engineering: which dishes are stars and which are passengers.
A dish with no recipe still sells happily. But its ingredients never tick down and its food cost reads 0%, which flatters your numbers. The Recipes banner exists to hunt exactly these.
Inventory & buying
- Inventory: the storeroom's front page. On-hand, value, running low, expiring soon, latest movements, and a barcode scanner that's always listening ("Scan any label, any time").
- Stock counts: start a count, walk the shelves, post it, see what didn't match.
- Batches & expiry: lots and dates, FEFO ordering, expired stock locked out of sale.
- Stock value: everything priced at moving-average cost, ranked into ABC classes.
- Reorder alerts: what fell below its reorder point, with one-tap draft POs by supplier.
- Purchasing: create, send, and receive POs.
- Waste: log what got thrown away and why. Empty is the goal.
Tahini runs low → alert appears → you draft the PO in one tap → goods arrive, you receive them → stock rises, costs update, every hummus's food cost refreshes itself. You did almost nothing, on purpose.
Floor & front-of-house
- Reservations: the booking ledger, plus a no-show heatmap that tells you which slots get stood up.
- Customers: your guest book. Visits, spend, favourite orders, a VIP button.
- Feedback: ratings and comments, fresh enough to act on while the guest is still parking.
- Reprints: print that receipt again without drama.
- Kitchen / Printers: the kitchen screen and your printer hardware.
- Calendar: who works when.
- Deliveries: orders from delivery apps, straight into the kitchen, tracked out the door.
- Marketing: email and SMS campaigns to bring guests back.
Finance
- Books: the accounting home. Profit & Loss, taxes, expenses, payables, cash & drawers, day closes, audits, Z-reports.
- Receipts: every emailed or texted receipt and whether it arrived.
- Refunds: what came back, which dishes bounce most, and which cashier refunds most. A quiet fraud-watch.
- Cash position: today's cash across every till: collected, refunded, paid in, paid out.
- Payroll preview: projected pay from real clocked hours.
- Tip pool / Pricing audit: fair tips, and a diary of every price change.
The end-of-shift receipt about the shift itself: sales, tax, tips, payment breakdown, and whether the drawer matched. The oldest ritual in retail, done for you.
People & settings
- Staff & cashiers: accounts, roles, 4-to-8-digit PINs, fingerprint or face for fast clock-in.
- Sign-in accounts: who can sign in at all. Disable a leaver in one tap. Flags anyone with no roles.
- Permissions ("Who can do what"): a simple grid of people × jobs. Tick to grant, untick to remove, saves instantly.
- Tables: every table by room, with seats and QR codes.
- POS configuration: the few settings that are truly a choice. Most things are simply built in and always on.
- Restaurant: your name, logo, colours, hours, receipt sign-off, Arabic tagline.
- AI Assistant: ask your own data questions in plain words.
The Till, Screen by Screen
Signing in & opening up
Staff sign in with a username and a short PIN. Fast on purpose; service doesn't wait for passwords. First job of the day: open a shift and confirm the starting cash. Until then, the till will show you the floor but politely refuse to take money.
The Floor
Your dining room as tiles. Room tabs across the top (Indoor Upper, Terrace…), Take Away for orders with no table, and a legend explaining the status dots: Free, Seated, Ordering, Food ordered, Food served, Check requested. The Height/Width buttons just fit the map to your screen.
Tables are brand-blue by design; it matches the floor you drew in Studio. Read a table's state from its little dot, not its colour.
Seating a table
Tap a table and a small card offers three moves: Start order, Just seated (they're browsing), or Join tables (big group, push two together).
The Order screen
- Left: categories with counts. Middle: dishes as photo cards. Right: the growing order, which starts as a friendly "Ready when you are."
- Tap a dish to add it. Long-press to open modifiers and a note.
- Walk-in Customer → Tap to identify attaches a real guest, which switches on their loyalty points.
- Open Item types a custom line. Add table note whispers to the kitchen.
- Happy? Fire. Tickets fly to their stations.
Add "Chicken Tawook Plate", long-press, tap "extra garlic", type "well done", fire. The grill's ticket reads: 1× Chicken Tawook · extra garlic · well done. Exactly what the cook needs, nothing they don't.
Paying & splitting
Open Payment from the order. Pick tenders (cash, card, gift card), type what the guest handed over, and the screen does the change math for you. Need separate payers? Split evenly, by item, or by custom amounts, and the screen tracks who still owes what. Coupons and discounts apply here and totals re-figure themselves live. Cash settles? The drawer kicks open.
Check the shift. No open shift, no money. That's the money rule doing its job.
The drawer & closing the shift
Mid-shift you can record cash in / cash out (paying the vegetable guy from the till, topping up the float). At night, close the shift: count the drawer, each currency in its own pile, and Sufrati shows the variance and prints the Z-report. Ten calm minutes that make tomorrow's accounting free.
The kitchen display
/pos/kitchen lists live tickets oldest-first with a Live indicator and sort/refresh controls. Cooks tap items done as they plate. When the queue empties it says "Kitchen is caught up", which deserves to be framed.
The guest display (CFD)
/pos/cfd faces the guest: a bilingual welcome, then their order building live as you ring it. Guests who can see the screen trust the screen.
The host desk
/pos/reservations is the door's cockpit: today's stats up top, a live floor, the waitlist, and arriving reservations. Add walk-ins, check people in, seat them with a tap, merge or split tables when the party grows.
The Live monitor
/pos/monitor is the manager's wall: every table's status in real time, "0 of 43 tables busy", and an activity feed of payments, refunds, service calls, and kitchen events. There's a full-screen TV mode made for a screen on the office wall.
What Your Guests See
The QR menu
Every table wears a permanent QR code; laminate it once and forget it. A guest scans and lands on your menu, in your colours, with your dishes' photos and prices, marked with their table number. They can browse, add items (where you've enabled self-ordering), tap Call waiter, or tap Request bill. It looks right in light and dark, in English and Arabic.
No waiting to see a menu, no waving for attention. With a working connection, "call waiter" requests appear on the Live monitor and the waiter's screen, so the wave still happens, just silently.
Feedback
Guests can rate and comment; it lands in the office Feedback page and the monitor's feed. The best time to fix a bad night is before the guest reaches their car.
The time clock
/clock is a shared kiosk by the staff door: photos and names grouped by role. Tap yourself in, tap yourself out. Hours flow to the People dashboard and payroll without a spreadsheet in sight.
Recipes for Every Day
Open the day
- Sign into the till with your PIN.
- Open a shift; count and confirm the float.
- Poke the kitchen printer or screen to be sure it's awake.
- Glance at Inventory: anything expiring? Anything low? 86 what you can't serve.
Seat a walk-in and take their order
- Host desk → Add party, name and size. (Table already free? Seat them straight away.)
- When a table opens, tap the guest's name to seat them.
- Open the table → Start order. Tap dishes; long-press for modifiers.
- Fire. The kitchen takes it from here.
Split a bill three ways
- Order → Payment → Split.
- Pick the style: even, by item, or custom.
- Take each person's payment; the screen keeps score.
- The last payment closes the bill.
Give a refund
- Find the sale (office → Refunds, or from the order).
- Choose full or partial; pick the items or amount.
- Confirm. Tax and discount shares reverse, loyalty backs out, stock returns. All automatic.
You can never refund more than was paid. Partial refunds always cap at what's left.
Count the stock
- Inventory → Stock counts → Start a count.
- Walk the shelves entering real quantities. Scan barcodes to jump to items.
- Post it. Differences are booked and flagged, so surprises become findings.
Receive a delivery
- Open the matching PO in Purchasing.
- Check quantities and the price paid; receive.
- Stock rises, average costs update, recipe costs refresh. Done.
Close the day
- Settle any open tables.
- Close the shift; count each drawer, each currency in its own pile.
- Look at the variance. More than pocket change? Ask why tonight, not next week.
- The Z-report prints. Tomorrow's numbers are already waiting in the office.
Follow the Money
A dollar's journey
- An order becomes an invoice: subtotal, minus discount, plus tax, equals grand total.
- The guest pays with one or more tenders. Cash sleeps in a drawer; cards travel to your processor.
- The sale books as revenue in your base currency, whatever mix of money physically arrived.
- Loyalty accrues, coupons are logged, gift-card balances shift.
- At close, the drawer is counted and reconciled. The shift rolls into the day, the day into the month, the month into your decisions.
The final number the guest owes, after discounts and tax. Sufrati computes it carefully around inclusive-vs-additive tax so nobody ever pays tax twice.
Tax
Tell Sufrati once whether your prices include tax or add it at the till. From then on, Books → Taxes holds your filing number for any period. No spreadsheet acrobatics in April.
What you give away
Every discount, coupon, and promotion is logged with its cost. The Overview's figure is net of refunds, so generosity is measured honestly, not inflated by money that came back.
Over & short
Counted cash minus expected cash. Short means less than expected, over means more. Coins happen. Patterns don't.
The system expected $612; you counted $597. That's $15 short, pinned to one drawer, one person, one shift. Now it's a conversation with facts instead of a mystery with suspects.
Which report answers which question
| You're wondering… | Open this |
|---|---|
| How's today going? | Overview |
| Are we actually profitable? | Books → Profit & Loss |
| Did the cash add up? | Shift variance · Books → Z-reports · Cash position |
| What am I giving away? | Overview discounts · Promotions → Discount audit |
| Are refunds fishy? | Refunds, by dish and by cashier |
| What does each dish cost me? | Recipes · Menu engineering |
| What needs ordering? | Reorder alerts |
Can't remember where a number lives? Ask the AI Assistant in plain words: "how much tax did we collect last month?" It reads your own data and just answers.
Make It Yours, Then Grow
Arabic in one tap
Tap the globe in the top bar and the entire platform, office, till, and guest menu, flips to Arabic and mirrors right-to-left. Instantly, no restart. Your own data (dish names, guest names) stays exactly as you typed it; only the interface translates.
Your logo, your colours
In Restaurant settings: upload your logo once (Sufrati generates the light and dark versions), pick a menu colour theme or set your own accent, write your opening hours, an Arabic tagline, and the thank-you line printed at the bottom of every receipt. Guests see your brand, not ours.
Opening branch two
Add a second branch and Sufrati quietly reveals the tools it was hiding: Stock transfers between locations, per-branch stock and tills, and a branch roll-up so you see each location and the whole group. Everything in this book still applies. There's just one new question on some screens: "which branch?"
A–Z Glossary
- 86 (eighty-six)
- "We're out." Hides an item from every menu until restored.
- ABC classes
- Stock ranked by value: A holds the top 80%, B the next 15%, C the rest.
- Additive tax
- Tax added on top of the price at the till.
- Back office (/app)
- The admin side: setup and reporting.
- Base currency
- The one currency your reports speak.
- Batch
- One delivery lot of an ingredient, with its own expiry date.
- Bill / Invoice
- The order priced up for payment.
- BOM
- Bill of Materials; another name for a recipe's ingredient list.
- Branch
- One physical location of your restaurant.
- Cancel
- Killing a whole order. Kitchen is told; stock walks back.
- Category
- A menu group that also steers kitchen routing.
- CFD
- Customer-Facing Display; the guest's second screen.
- Change ticket
- A "CHANGE" kitchen slip for edits to already-fired items.
- Coupon
- A code a guest presents for a discount.
- Drawer / Till
- The cash box on a terminal; where the money rule lives.
- Drawer kick
- The signal that pops the drawer open.
- FEFO
- First Expired, First Out; oldest-expiring stock used first, expired stock blocked.
- Fire
- "Kitchen, start now."
- Floor
- The live map of tables on the till.
- Gift card
- Money paid now, spent later.
- Grand total
- The final amount owed after discount and tax.
- Hold
- Keep items on the order without cooking them yet.
- Host desk
- The door's workspace: bookings and the waitlist.
- Inclusive tax
- Tax already hiding inside the shelf price.
- Kitchen display
- A live screen of tickets to cook.
- KOT
- Kitchen Order Ticket; what to cook, no prices.
- Live monitor
- The manager's real-time wall view of the whole floor.
- Loyalty points
- Points guests earn per spend.
- Menu / Menu item
- Your sellable list / one thing on it.
- Modifier
- A choice or add-on riding on an item.
- Moving-average cost
- The running average of what an ingredient costs you.
- Native currency
- The money physically inside a drawer.
- Open item
- A custom off-menu line typed by hand.
- Order
- Everything a table is having, before payment.
- Payment / Tender
- Settling the bill / one way money arrived.
- POS (/pos)
- The till; the service-time surface.
- Promotion
- A deal that applies itself when its rules match.
- Purchase order (PO)
- Your shopping list sent to a supplier.
- QR self-order
- The table QR that puts your menu on the guest's phone.
- Receiving
- Booking a PO's goods into stock at cost.
- Recipe
- Ingredients per serving; turns sales into stock movement.
- Refund
- Money going back, capped and fully reversed (tax, loyalty, stock).
- Reorder point
- The low-water mark that triggers an alert.
- Reservation
- A booking for later.
- Role
- A keyring: a named job that opens the right doors.
- Room
- An area of a branch on the floor plan.
- Shift
- The envelope between opening and closing a till.
- Split bill
- One table, several payers.
- Station
- A kitchen spot that receives certain dishes.
- Stock / On-hand
- What's physically on your shelves.
- Stock count
- A physical count reconciled against expectations.
- Studio
- The floor-plan editor (Developer tool).
- Table
- A numbered spot with seats and a permanent QR code.
- Tendered vs kept
- What the guest handed over vs what stays after change.
- Terminal
- A device signed into the till.
- Time clock
- The kiosk where staff clock in and out.
- Tip pool
- Tips shared by a rule instead of kept individually.
- Transfer
- Stock moving between branches.
- Variance
- Counted cash minus expected cash. Over or short.
- Void
- Removing one item before payment.
- Waitlist
- Walk-ins waiting for a table right now.
- Waste
- Thrown-away stock, recorded with a reason.
- Z-report
- The end-of-shift summary: sales, tax, tips, and whether cash matched.
When Something Looks Wrong
"I can't take a payment."
Is a shift open on this till? No shift, no money. That's the rule.
"So-and-so can't find a page."
It's their role, almost every time. Access follows assigned roles and permissions. Ask your restaurant administrator to review your access in Permissions.
"We sold a dish but stock didn't move."
That dish has no recipe. Add one; the Recipes banner lists every dish missing one.
"The kitchen never got the order."
Did you fire it, or just add it? And does its category route to a station with a working printer or screen? Unmapped items fall back to the default printer, so check there too.
"An item refuses to sell."
Either it's marked 86 (restore it in Menu) or its only stock is an expired batch, which Sufrati quarantines from sale on purpose.
"The cash is short."
Read the variance on the close screen. It names the drawer, the person, and the window. One-off small shorts happen; patterns deserve a conversation.
"A page looked empty for a second."
The heavy pages (Books, POS configuration) load a lot. Give them a breath. Persistent blankness with errors is worth reporting; a two-second skeleton is not.
"A guest scanned the QR and got nothing."
The code is permanent, but paper isn't. Reprint it from Tables and check the table still exists in that room.
Role Cheat-Sheet
| Role | Lives in | First move of the day |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Overview, Books, Staff, Restaurant settings | Read yesterday. Adjust the menu. |
| Manager | Overview, Menu, Staff, Promotions, the floor | Open the day. Watch the monitor. |
| Captain | The floor, the host desk | Seat and assign. |
| Waiter / Cashier | Order and payment screens | Take orders, fire, settle. |
| Host | The host desk | Run the door. |
| Accountant | Books, Refunds, Cash position | Reconcile. File. Sleep well. |
| Kitchen | The kitchen display or their station | Cook what fires. |
| Inventory / Stock | Inventory, Purchasing, Waste | Count, receive, reorder. |
| Developer | Studio, Configuration, Accounts, Permissions | Design rooms. Wire devices. Guard the keys. |
You know the two screens, the keyrings, the money rule, and every word from order to Z-report. Run one full day with this guide within reach and by tomorrow it will feel like you've always known it. Welcome to Sufrati.
Sufrati — The Friendly Field Guide · Read once, run everything.