FAQ

Getting Started

What do I set up first?

A location. Go to Locations → New and create your venue with its opening hours, currency, tax rate and timezone — almost everything else hangs off it. Then build the menu, and you can take an order the same day. See Quick Start.

Do I have to use all of it?

No. Thirteen functional areas are toggleable modules under Apps. Turn off delivery if you don't deliver, KDS if the kitchen prefers paper, inventory if you don't count stock. When a module is off its nav item disappears and its server-side endpoints refuse the request, so nothing is merely hidden.

Menu is the one exception. It is the foundation that orders, KDS, POS and delivery all depend on, so it is marked core and cannot be switched off.

Can I try it without touching real data?

Yes. Settings → Demo Mode seeds a fully populated demo restaurant — locations, menu items, reservations, orders and staff — and puts the component into a read-only tour where every write is refused at the server. It is the safe way to show the product to a client or explore an area you have not used before. See Demo Mode.

Which Joomla and PHP versions are supported?

Joomla 4, 5 and 6, on PHP 8.1 or higher, with MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.4+.

Can I run more than one restaurant on one install?

Yes. Create a location per venue. Menu pricing and availability, stock, staff and terminals can each be scoped to a location, and a terminal bound to one location is refused if it tries to act on another. See Locations.

Ordering & Service

Do orders from the website, the QR code and the POS end up in the same place?

Yes, and that is the central design decision. Every channel writes the same order record. They route to the same kitchen stations, deplete the same stock, settle into the same payments ledger, and appear together in reports. There is no reconciliation step because there is nothing to reconcile.

How does QR scan-to-order work?

Each dining table has its own QR code that opens a guest ordering page bound to that table. The guest browses the live menu, orders, and — if you enable pay-at-table — pays, with no app to install and no account to create. The order arrives on the kitchen display like any other, tagged with the table it came from. See QR Ordering.

Can a guest cancel their own order?

If corrections are enabled, yes — within the window you configure, and only while the kitchen has not started the item. After that it goes through staff, behind a manager PIN. Every correction is written to the audit log with an explicit waste-or-restock decision. See Order Corrections.

What happens when we run out of something?

Two mechanisms, both optional. Anyone on the POS can 86 an item, which pulls it from every ordering channel immediately. And if the item has a recipe, auto-86 can pull it automatically when a linked ingredient hits zero. See Inventory.

Can we split a bill?

Yes. The POS supports seats, bill splitting, and transferring a check to another table or server. Discounts, voids and comps work at both line and check level, gated behind a manager PIN. See Point of Sale.

Does the kitchen have to bump whole tickets?

No. Lines can be bumped individually, so a twenty-minute cook doesn't hold the rest of the ticket at the pass. Routing rules decide which station each line lands on in the first place. See Kitchen Display.

Reservations

Will it stop us double-booking a table?

Yes. The availability engine offers slots against your opening hours, the capacity of the tables you have defined, and the bookings already in the diary. A slot that cannot actually be seated is not offered, and the booking write takes a lock so two simultaneous requests cannot claim the same table. See Reservations.

Can I draw my actual dining room?

Yes. Each floor gets its own canvas where you place tables and chairs, define areas, and rotate and resize as needed, with pan and zoom. The same map has an Operate mode showing live occupancy during service. See Floor Map.

Do guests get confirmation emails?

Yes. Bookings run through a status state machine that drives HTML confirmation, reminder and status-change emails to the guest, plus staff notifications. Emails are only sent where there is an address to send to. See Notifications.

Payments

Which payment providers are supported?

In 6.0.0: PayPal for card payments online, plus cash, card terminal, bank transfer, voucher, on-account and pay-on-arrival as manual settlement types. Each provider has its own configuration form — you pick the provider, fill in its fields, and it becomes available as a payment option.

Stripe, Adyen, Square, SumUp, gift card and loyalty are listed but not yet available. They show in the picker marked Coming soon and cannot be enabled: the card providers cannot yet initiate a charge, and gift card and loyalty have no balance validation behind them. Each unlocks in a future update. For cards in person today, use Card terminal — it works alongside a Square or SumUp reader you already own. See Payment Gateways.

What if the guest closes the browser mid-payment?

The payment still settles. Redirect providers are backed by a webhook: if the guest never returns from the hosted checkout page, the provider's webhook confirms the capture and the order is settled server-side. See Payments.

Can I refund from inside Joomla?

Yes. Payments → Refunds issues full or partial refunds back through the original provider and records them against both the order and the transactions ledger. Manual settlement types are recorded as refunds without a provider call.

Are card details stored on my site?

No. Card providers use their own hosted checkout or their own terminal, so card numbers never reach your server. What is stored is the provider's transaction reference, the amount and the status.

Can I see all payments in one place?

Yes — Payments is a dedicated admin view listing every transaction with filters and CSV export, plus a refunds tab. It is deliberately not tied to the reports permission, so someone who reconciles the till does not need access to sales analytics.

Staff & Access

Can I stop kitchen staff seeing the sales reports?

Yes. Roles grant per-action access across sixteen feature areas — menu, orders, KDS, POS, reservations, QR, payments, delivery, customers, loyalty, staff, reports, inventory, locations, settings and terminals. Give the kitchen role KDS and nothing else, and reports are neither in the nav nor reachable through the API. See Roles & Permissions.

Do floor staff need a Joomla account?

No. A staff terminal is provisioned once with a device token; after that, staff identify themselves with a PIN. You can restrict which staff and which roles a given terminal accepts, and bind it to a single location. See Staff Terminals.

How do we track hours?

The clock-in terminal handles clock in, clock out and breaks. Staff → Time Clock shows the timesheet, and the staff-hours report totals hours and labour cost for a date range.

What is the manager PIN for?

Actions that need a second pair of eyes — voids, comps, discounts and corrections. The PIN is checked server-side and the action is written to the audit log with who authorised it.

Technical

Where do the public pages come from?

Joomla menu items. Next Restaurant ships menu item types for the storefront pages — menu showcase, ordering, booking, gift cards, reviews, gallery and the customer account area — so the public pages sit in your site's normal navigation and inherit your template. Pages are server-rendered and enhanced with React islands where interaction is needed. See Storefront.

Is there an API?

Yes, and it is off by default. Enable the API module under Apps to expose the public REST endpoints, and configure outbound webhooks under Integrations. See REST API and Webhooks.

Can I change what the interface calls things?

Yes. Settings → Terminology overrides interface strings — call a check a bill, a server a waiter, a location a branch — without editing language files and without losing the changes on update.

What languages are included?

English (en-GB) ships out of the box. Add any language with standard Joomla .ini files under administrator/language/<tag>/com_nextrestaurant.ini and com_nextrestaurant.sys.ini.

Does it work offline?

Partly. The admin and terminals are progressive web apps and show an offline banner when the connection drops, so staff know the screen is stale rather than idle. Orders still require a connection to be written. Full offline POS operation is not supported.

Is the source available?

Yes. Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later. Sold commercially on nextsoftware.dev with priority support; the source itself is open.