Next Restaurant
Most restaurants end up paying for four or five systems that never talk to each other: a booking widget on the website, a delivery portal that takes a cut of every order, a till on the counter that knows about neither, and a spreadsheet for stock. Each one bills you every month, keeps its own copy of your customers, and leaves somebody re-typing figures at the end of the night.
Next Restaurant does the whole job in one place, on your own website. Guests browse your menu, order for pickup or delivery, book a table, buy and redeem gift cards and leave reviews — with no commission taken on anything. Sitting at a table, they scan the QR code and order without waiting to catch a server's eye.
Your team gets what it takes to run service: a full point of sale with open checks, discounts, split bills, refunds and a cash drawer; a kitchen display that shows every ticket the moment it lands, whichever channel it came from; bookings on a floor plan you draw to match your actual room; delivery zones and driver dispatch; stock that comes off your recipes as dishes sell and pulls a dish from the menu when it runs out; and a payments ledger that reconciles the day.
Because it is all one system, an order is an order. A QR order at table 12 reaches the same kitchen screen as one from your website, comes off the same stock, settles in the same ledger and lands in the same end-of-day report. Thirteen of the built-in apps can be switched off individually if you don't need them, every member of staff sees only the parts their role allows, and tablets around the restaurant run stripped-down till, kitchen, pickup, waiter, host and clock-in screens without anyone logging into Joomla.
See it in action
Everything you need
Menu Management
Build the menu once and publish it everywhere.
Items, Categories & Variants
Full menu authoring with per-item pricing, availability windows and per-location overrides.
Modifier Groups
Reusable option sets — sizes, extras, cooking preferences — with min/max rules and price deltas.
Allergens & Dietary Tags
Tag every item with allergens and diet labels that surface on the public menu and the KDS ticket.
Images & Galleries
Per-item photography with built-in cropping, plus a venue gallery for the storefront.
86 an Item Instantly
Mark an item unavailable from the POS or admin and it disappears from every ordering channel at once.
Ordering Channels
One order pipeline, however the guest chooses to order.
Online Ordering & Checkout
Pickup, delivery and dine-in orders on your own site, with cart, coupons and payment at checkout.
QR Scan-to-Order
Guests scan the table code, browse the menu, order and pay without an app or an account.
Counter & Phone Orders
Staff raise orders directly in the POS or the admin orders screen.
Unified Order Record
Every channel writes the same order, so kitchen routing, stock depletion and reporting never fork.
Order Corrections
Cancel, modify, remake, comp, discount and refund — manager-PIN gated, fully audited, with waste-vs-restock handling.
Point of Sale
A full-service POS built for a busy counter, not a demo.
Open Checks & Append
Hold tabs open across a service and add rounds to them as the table goes.
Seats, Splits & Transfers
Assign items to seats, split a check evenly or by seat, and move it to another table or server.
Discounts, Voids & Comps
Line- and check-level adjustments behind a manager PIN, every one of them logged.
Payments & Receipts
Take cash, card, gift card or on-account, print or email the receipt, and process refunds.
Cash Drawer
Open, count and reconcile the drawer with a session record you can audit.
Kitchen Display
Replace the ticket printer with screens the kitchen can actually work from.
Live Order Board
Tickets stream in from every channel with elapsed timers and colour-coded urgency.
Stations & Routing Rules
Route each line to the right station — grill, fry, pass, bar — by category, item or order type.
Line-Level State
Bump individual lines, not just whole tickets, so a long cook doesn't block the pass.
Cancellation Alerts
A guest or manager cancellation raises a banner on the affected station until a cook acknowledges it.
Reservations & Floor
Take bookings that respect your real capacity.
Availability Engine
Slots are offered against opening hours, table capacity and existing bookings — no double-booking.
Drawable Floor Maps
A canvas editor for each floor: tables, chairs, areas, rotation and resize, with pan and zoom.
Operate vs Layout Modes
Flip the same map between designing the room and running service with live occupancy.
Guest Notifications
HTML confirmation, reminder and status-change emails driven by a booking state machine.
Host & Waiter Screens
Seat parties, track table status and take orders from the floor on a tablet.
Delivery & Dispatch
Run your own delivery instead of renting someone else's.
Delivery Zones
Define zones with their own fees, minimums and delivery windows.
Driver Management
Maintain a driver roster, assign orders and track dispatch state.
Dispatch Board
See what's cooking, what's ready and what's on the road on one screen.
Inventory & Recipes
Know what you're using and what it costs.
Stock Items & Levels
Track ingredients per location with units, par levels and low-stock alerts.
Recipe-Driven Depletion
Link menu items to recipes so selling a dish draws down its ingredients automatically.
Movement Ledger
Every receipt, depletion, waste event and adjustment recorded as a movement you can trace.
Waste Log & Auto-86
Log waste with a reason, and let items go unavailable automatically when an ingredient runs out.
Payments
Take money through the provider you already use.
Provider Registry
PayPal alongside cash, card terminal, bank transfer, voucher, on-account and pay-on-arrival. Stripe, Adyen, Square, SumUp, gift card and loyalty ship listed as Coming soon and are enabled in later updates.
Redirect & Webhook Flows
Hosted-checkout redirects with a webhook backstop, so a settlement is never lost to a closed browser tab.
Transactions Ledger
Every capture, refund and adjustment in one filterable admin view with CSV export.
Refunds
Full and partial refunds issued back through the original provider and recorded against the order.
Staff & Terminals
Put the right screen in the right pair of hands.
Roles & Permissions
Sixteen feature areas with per-action grants, assigned to Joomla users by role.
Staff Terminals
Lean POS, KDS, pickup, waiter, host and clock-in views that run on a tablet with no Joomla login.
Device Token + PIN
Terminals are provisioned once, then staff identify themselves with a PIN — restrictable per terminal.
Time Clock
Clock in and out, take breaks, and report hours and labour cost per shift.
Multi-Location
One install, however many venues.
Location Records
Each venue carries its own hours, contact details, tax and service-charge settings.
Per-Location Menu & Stock
Override price and availability per venue, and track stock separately at each.
Scoped Staff & Terminals
Bind a terminal or a staff member to one location so it can never act on another.
Configuration
Turn the product into your product.
Thirteen Toggleable Modules
Switch off KDS, delivery, inventory, loyalty or the public API — dependent modules grey out automatically.
Terminology Editor
Rename anything the UI calls something you don't — "check" to "bill", "server" to "waiter".
Currency, Tax & Formatting
Currency, position, decimals, tax rate, service charge, date format, timezone, units.
Demo Mode
A one-switch, read-only tour with seeded data that refuses every write, for showing the product safely.
Developer
A modern stack with nothing deprecated in it.
Single-Page Admin
The back office is one fast app — no page reload as you move between orders, the kitchen and the till.
Search-Friendly Storefront
Your menu and ordering pages are real pages: fast to load and readable by search engines.
REST API & Webhooks
An opt-in public API and outbound webhooks for integrating whatever you run alongside.
Namespaced Joomla MVC
Joomla 4, 5 and 6 on PHP 8.1+, GPL licensed and upgrade-safe.
Built for the EU Cyber Resilience Act
Free security updates for at least 5 years from your purchase
Every customer — active or lapsed — can download security fixes from the Customer Portal throughout their support period, in line with the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
Frequently Asked Questions
Getting Started
A location. Go to Components → Next Restaurant → Locations and create your venue with its opening hours, currency and tax rate — almost everything else hangs off it. Then build the menu under Menu, and you can take an order the same day.
No. Thirteen of the 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. The nav item disappears and the server-side endpoints refuse the request. Menu is the one exception — it's the foundation every operational module depends on, so it can't be switched off.
Yes. Settings → Demo Mode seeds a fully populated demo restaurant — locations, menu, reservations, orders, staff — and puts the whole component into a read-only tour where every write is refused. It's the safe way to show the product to a client or explore an area you haven't used yet.
Yes. Next Restaurant runs on Joomla 4, 5 and 6, on PHP 8.1 or higher.
Ordering & Service
Each dining table gets a 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, without downloading an app or creating an account. The order lands on the kitchen display exactly like any other, tagged with the table.
Yes, and that is the point of the whole design. Website, QR, POS, phone and counter orders are one record type. They route to the same kitchen stations, deplete the same stock, settle into the same payments ledger, and appear together in reports.
If you enable corrections, yes — within the window you configure, and only while the kitchen hasn't started it. Everything after that goes through staff, behind a manager PIN, and every correction is written to the audit log with a waste-or-restock decision.
Two things, 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.
Payments
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 appears as a payment option. Stripe, Adyen, Square, SumUp, gift card and loyalty are listed in the picker as Coming soon and cannot be enabled in 6.0.0 — they are turned on by later updates. For cards taken in person today, Card terminal works alongside a Square or SumUp reader you already own.
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 from the server side.
Yes. Payments → Refunds issues full or partial refunds back through the original provider and records them against the order and the transactions ledger. Cash and other manual types are recorded as refunds without a provider call.
No. Card providers use hosted checkout or their own terminal — card numbers never reach your server. What Next Restaurant stores is the provider's transaction reference, the amount and the status.
Staff & Access
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 visible in the nav nor reachable through the API.
No. Staff terminals run on a device that's 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.
The clock-in terminal handles clock in/out and breaks; Staff → Time Clock shows the timesheet, and the staff-hours report totals hours and labour cost for a date range.
Technical
Menu items in Joomla. Next Restaurant ships menu-item types for the storefront pages — menu showcase, ordering, booking, gift cards, reviews and the venue gallery — so the public pages sit in your site's normal navigation and inherit your template.
Yes, and it's off by default. Enable the API module under Apps to expose the public REST endpoints, and configure outbound webhooks under Integrations to push events to whatever else you run.
Yes. Settings → Terminology overrides the interface strings — call a check a bill, a server a waiter, a location a branch — without editing language files or losing the changes on update.
English (en-GB). Add any language with standard Joomla .ini files under administrator/language/<tag>/com_nextrestaurant.ini and com_nextrestaurant.sys.ini.
Yes. Licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later. Sold commercially on nextsoftware.dev with priority support; the source itself is open.