Everything Aura does
One server, five front-ends, and no per-feature upsell inside a product. This page walks every surface and what it actually does. Aura is sold as three products — Restaurant, Shop and QR Ordering — and your quote covers the features of the ones you run, with no "advanced" edition of any of them. Each block links to the matching how-to in the help centre.
Where the money is made. Adapts to the device: on tablets and desktops the cart is a side panel, on phones a docked bar shows the running total and opens the cart as a sheet.
Find it fast
Category pills, a search field that matches name, SKU or barcode, and full barcode-scanner support anywhere the search field works.
Badges that prevent mistakes
Every product card shows the price, a VAT badge (15% / 0% / EX), MOD if it has options, a stock badge for counted items, and 86 when it's out.
Modifiers with price deltas
Groups with min/max rules — required groups must be satisfied before Add. Allergy notes and special requests go in the same sheet.
Order types
Dine-in, Takeaway, Delivery, Bar Tab or QR, as chips above the grid. Hidden entirely in shop mode.
Seats up to 12
Shared / S1 / S2 chips, a ⟳ auto mode that advances the seat as you ring, and per-seat subtotals once seats are assigned.
Courses
The cart groups by course with a Send on each course header, so you can fire the starters and hold the mains.
Notes at both levels
A note per line via the ⋮ overflow, and a note for the whole order from the cart header. Both reach the kitchen ticket.
Attach a customer
Search by name or phone, or quick-add on the spot. Loyalty points accrue automatically and store credit becomes available as a tender.
Discounts, voids and comps
Percent presets or a fixed rand amount with a reason code. VAT is recalculated on the discounted base. All manager-gated and audit-logged.
86 and wastage
Long-press a product to mark it out of stock everywhere, or to log wastage — spillage, dropped, expired, burned.
Fired vs unsent
Once lines are sent they move to a read-only 🔥 Fired to kitchen section, with totals split into "fired" and "this round".
Park and layby
Park a basket to resume later, or start a layby with a deposit and tracked installments. Retail mode, but available anywhere.
Zones, live table status, and everything you do to a table once guests are on it.
Five table states
Available, seated, billed, reserved, cleaning — each colour-coded, updating live across every till on the realtime feed.
Signals on the tile
Covers, elapsed time, running total, course progress, a ×2 marker for multiple bills, a 📅 warning for an imminent booking, and slow-turn outlines at 45 and 90 minutes.
Seat with covers
Presets 1–8 and a stepper to 12. Covers feed per-seat ordering, by-seat splits and the covers report. Skippable for counter-style venues.
Check in a booking
If a booking is assigned to the table, the seat sheet offers Check in booking so the reservation is honoured rather than double-booked.
Move items or the whole sale
Tick lines and pick a destination, or drag a sale from one table to another. Open kitchen tickets follow.
Transfer and merge
Transfer to a free table, or merge two tables into one bill — lines, discounts, tips and covers all carry across. Merge asks first, because it can't be undone.
Multiple bills per table
Long-press → + New sale on this table, for communal tables and late joiners. Tapping a stacked table lists the bills.
Arrange mode
Managers drag tables, add sections, set shapes and party bands, auto-arrange a section onto a grid, and retire tables. Works offline.
Floor-plan photo
Upload a picture of the real room per zone and the tiles draw over it, up to 700KB.
The Kitchen tab on any terminal. The header shows active tickets, rushed count, and the age of the oldest.
Oldest first, rush pinned
The board orders by age with rushed tickets pinned to the front. Ages tick up live and the board refreshes every few seconds.
What's on a ticket
Table or Counter, covers, order number, order type · station · course, every item with quantity, prep notes in red, an ⚠ ALLERGENS banner, and the server's name.
Ageing colours
Amber at 5 minutes, red at 10. New and recalled tickets flash green for a few seconds so nothing is missed.
Tick items as you plate
Tap a line to strike it through; the ticket shows progress like 3/5.
Ready, bump, recall
🔔 Ready pops the green run-this-table banner on every terminal. Bump clears the ticket. ↩ Recall brings back the last bump. ⇊ Bump whole table clears a table at once.
Station filters
One chip per prep station, plus 🔥 Rush and 🥡 Takeaway chips.
All-day view
Totals outstanding items across every ticket — "6× Sirloin" — for batch cooking.
86 from the ticket
Long-press an item to mark it unavailable across the terminals, the QR menu and the back office at once.
Takeaway and QR tickets
Takeaways show 🥡 PICKUP with the promised time. Guest QR orders arrive automatically with table and order number.
A progressive web app — no install, works in any browser, pinnable to the home screen. Four modes from the same app. This whole block is the QR Ordering product: bundled with a Restaurant or Shop subscription, or run standalone with no till at all.
Table ordering
Scan the table's QR and the menu for that table and location opens with 86'd items already hidden. Guests browse categories, see photos and allergen warnings, pick modifiers with price deltas, set quantities, add a per-item note and an order note, and add a tip. Then they either pay now by card on their own phone, or — at venues running the Restaurant product — add it to the table's bill for the waiter to settle at the till. The order fires straight to the kitchen, station-routed, and the table is marked occupied. Live status runs Received → Preparing → Paid.
Takeaway / click-and-collect
No table needed. The guest enters a pickup name and optional phone, and chooses ASAP or a scheduled time 15 to 90 minutes out. The kitchen ticket is flagged 🥡 PICKUP with the promised time.
Kiosk mode
A counter tablet running a self-service loop: a full-screen "tap to order" attract screen, the normal order and pay flow, a large order-number confirmation, then an automatic 45-second reset, so nothing leaks to the next customer.
Online booking
Link it from your own website. Guests pick a date up to two weeks out, a party size from 1 to 20, and an available slot that respects your pacing and covers caps, then leave a name plus phone or email. Arrives pending for your team.
Nothing to install
A browser page, not an app — it opens from the table's code and can be pinned to the home screen if a guest wants it there.
Honest about payment
Card first: with Yoco configured the guest tips and pays in a hosted checkout on their own phone. Without it, a per-order SnapScan QR for the exact amount — and with neither, it says "pay at the counter" rather than faking it.
Validated server-side
Real prices, real products, sane quantities, rate-limited, and refused outright at venues whose licence has no QR Ordering — so a public endpoint can't be abused.
A large-type live mirror of the cart — items and VAT-labelled totals — so the guest can see what they're being charged for.
Three states
An idle welcome screen, the live cart during a sale, and a thank-you screen with total, payment method and order number after payment.
Second monitor on desktop
Settings → Customer display → Open on second screen pops it into its own window, mirroring the till it was opened from.
Or a dedicated tablet
On Android and iOS, point a guest-facing tablet at the Customer tab.
Nine tenders, four ways to split, and tips that reconcile to the cent.
Cash, properly
Quick-tender chips (Exact, R200 … R5000), change calculation, and ZAR 5c rounding on the cash portion only. Tips are never rounded.
Yoco, three ways
Card-present on the physical terminal, pay-by-link the guest settles on their own phone, or Tap to Pay using the device itself where SoftPOS is enabled.
SnapScan & Zapper
QR tenders at the till, plus a per-order SnapScan QR for guest self-service orders.
Stored value
Gift cards by code, house accounts with credit limits, and customer store credit — all verified server-side.
Four ways to split
Evenly 2–6 ways, by seat, by item, or by amount. Each portion is its own payment leg with its own method and tip.
Tips
Up to four configurable percentages on non-cash tenders, plus "no tip". Card tips reconcile on the X and Z reports.
The full drawer lifecycle, with an audit trail for every time it opens.
Open with a float
Then a live summary: opening float + cash sales + paid in − paid out = expected in drawer.
Paid in / paid out
Every non-sale cash event with a reason — change float, top-up, petty cash, supplier COD, bank drop, correction — and who recorded it.
No-sale is gated
Opening the drawer without a sale needs a manager PIN and is logged against the register with the approving manager.
Denomination counter
R200 down to 10c, totalling as you count — or skip it and type the total. The count is stored with the closure.
Live variance
Green when exact, red short, amber over. Closing runs the Z-report in one step: locks the register, posts the day's journal.
Managers see everything
Who's on a register now with live expected cash, closure history with variances, every movement, X/Z CSV exports, and force-close for a till left open.
Sixteen pages. Runs identically as a desktop app or in the browser
at /admin/, with a location switcher scoping the location-specific
pages.
| Page | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Today's revenue, covers, average check, tips, active tables, hourly chart, payment mix, and a "vs previous period" delta on each KPI. CSV export. |
| Sales | The same KPIs by period — today, yesterday, week, month, year — with hourly chart, payment mix and top products. |
| Menu | Products with price, cost, margin %, VAT type, course, emoji, image, SKU, barcode, description, allergens and stock tracking. Duplicate, activate/deactivate. Categories with colour, course type and prep station. Modifier groups and options. Variants. CSV menu import from Lightspeed, Tebi or Pilot. Barcode label sheets. |
| Prep stations | KDS routing stations with sort order, active flag, and an optional LAN prep printer (IP + port). |
| Inventory | The 86 list with clear, low-stock alerts, wastage logging, manual stock adjustments with a reason, stock counts, reorder points. |
| Tables | Zones and tables — label, seats, zone, shape, position, online-bookable with min/max party — retire, floor-plan image upload, print table QR codes. |
| People | Staff with name, role, PIN, contact, hourly rate and colour. Reset PINs, deactivate. Open shifts. House accounts with charge, settle and statements. |
| Registers | Who's on a register now with live expected cash, closure history and variances, every cash movement, X/Z exports, force-close. |
| Customers | The CRM — contact details, visit history, loyalty points and tier, and store-credit adjustments with an audited reason. |
| Reservations | Day and week diary, new and edited bookings, confirm (sends WhatsApp), seat, cancel, no-show, and availability schedules with slot pacing and covers caps. |
| Checklists | Templates — daily, weekly or one-off — and today's runs with live progress. |
| Reports | Menu engineering, service pacing, heatmap, server performance, accounting export, VAT201, end-of-day, and the discount/void/comp log. |
| Gift cards | Issue, search and filter by status, check balances, redeem manually. |
| Loyalty | Vouchers — percent or fixed, minimum spend, usage limits, enable/disable — and happy-hour price rules with day and time windows, scope and priority. |
| Settings | VAT and tax rates, guest-ordering site URL for QR printing, business type, server diagnostics, app version. |
| Tools | Suppliers with contacts, terms and VAT numbers. Purchase orders: create, send, receive — receiving stocks in the lines. Inter-branch transfers. |
86 list
Everything currently marked unavailable, with a clear action. 86'ing anywhere propagates everywhere.
Low stock
Reorder points raise alerts and a badge in the terminal's top bar.
Stock counts
Enter what you counted; Aura writes the adjustments and flags the variance.
Wastage
Spillage, dropped, expired, burned — logged from the till or the back office.
Purchase orders
Create, send, receive. Receiving stocks in the lines and feeds input VAT on your VAT201.
Reorder proposals
"Reorder low stock" drafts POs grouped by each product's supplier with quantities prefilled.
Branch transfers
Send leaves the source immediately; receive short and the gap is recorded as shrinkage in transit.
Stock value & aging
What you're holding, what it's worth, and what hasn't moved.
Cost and margin
Products carry a cost, so margin % shows on the product and drives menu engineering.
Points and tiers
1 point per R10 spent while a customer is attached. Bronze → Silver at R50,000 lifetime → Gold at R200,000. Points and visit history follow the customer to any terminal.
Vouchers
Percent or fixed-amount codes with a minimum spend, usage limits and an enable/disable switch.
Birthday vouchers
With the daily scheduler enabled, customers whose birthday is today automatically get a 20% voucher valid for 30 days.
Happy-hour price rules
Time-window pricing by day of week — percent off, rand off, or an override price — scoped to everything, a category or one product, with priorities when rules overlap. Applied server-side the moment an item is added, so the till and the QR menu always agree.
Gift cards
Issued with an AG- code and optional recipient. Redeemed at the payment sheet; partial balances remain. Searchable and filterable by status.
House accounts & store credit
Running credit accounts with limits and statements, and per-customer store credit that refunds can be issued to instead of cash.
Digital opening and closing task lists that replace the clipboard.
Templates
Title, recurrence — daily, weekly or one-off — and an ordered task list.
Worked on the terminal
Today's lists with progress bars. Each tick records who and when. Works offline.
Tracked in the office
Live done/total counts per run, and past dates are browsable.
Daily summary email
A digest of every checklist's completion state, to the address you set.
Eight report tabs, plus the live X-report on the terminal and the Z-report at close.
| Report | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Menu engineering | A popularity × margin quadrant per product — Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, Dogs — with a scatter chart. What to promote, re-price or drop. |
| Service pacing | Order→fire, fire→bump, order→settle and seated→first-order timings, average and p90, plus the slowest stations and courses and long-idle tables. |
| Heatmap | Revenue by day-of-week × hour over 7, 30 or 90 days — for staffing and prep planning. |
| Server performance | Orders, gross, tips and average check per server. |
| Products & customers | Quantity, revenue and margin by product, category and brand. New vs returning customers, average basket, repeat rate, top spenders. |
| Accounting | A balanced journal CSV for Xero or Sage/Pastel, for any date range. |
| VAT201 | A SARS-ready return for any period — standard, zero-rated and exempt sales, output VAT at 15%, input VAT from received POs, VAT payable — as CSV or PDF. |
| End of day | X-report and Z-report CSV export per shift. |
| Logs | Discounts, voids and comps with their reasons — your shrinkage audit trail. |
Offline-first, not offline-tolerant. There's a whole page on this — here's the shape of it.
Works with no connection
- PIN sign-in — staff PINs sync to every device
- Ringing items, notes, seats, discounts
- Walk-in ring-and-pay sales, committed atomically
- Voids, comps and discounts (audit rows sync later)
- Seating tables and rearranging the floor plan
- Checklists — viewing and ticking
Needs a connection
- Sending to the kitchen, and all KDS actions
- Billing a table or tab; splits, moves, merges
- Gift card, house account and store credit tenders; refunds
- 86'ing an item and logging wastage
- Clocking out, the X-report and the Z-report
- Tabs, order history, waitlist and reservations
Eight roles, enforced server-side. The client hides buttons as a convenience — the server is the actual gate.
| Action | Server / Cashier / Bartender / Chef / Host | Manager + |
|---|---|---|
| Ring & send orders, take payment | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open/settle tabs, work the KDS, tick checklists | ✓ | ✓ |
| Log wastage | ✓ | ✓ |
| Discounts, voids, comps, no-sale | Request only | ✓ by PIN |
| Refunds | — | ✓ button hidden otherwise |
| Terminal settings, floor editing | — | ✓ |
| Back office | — | ✓ |
| Create staff | — | ✓ at or below own role |
That's the tour. Want to drive it?
We'll load your menu or product list into a demo tenant first, so you're clicking around your own business.