Custom restaurant software: ingredient costs, purchasing and schedules, without the till

A compliant till is a legal obligation and will remain so: a tool you have built must not take payments. Everything else, ingredient costs, purchasing, hygiene plans and scheduling, is currently rented as modules from vendors, two of four of whom refuse to display a price.

Custom restaurant software is built beside the till, never in its place. The Sirene directory counts at least 167,226 traditional restaurant businesses and 171,329 fast-food businesses on September 2, 2026, lower bounds from the public Recherche d'entreprises API, whose counters are capped. Lightspeed Restaurant lists €89 monthly for one till licence and €249 for three, pricing page consulted September 2, 2026.

The compliant till, and why you do not rebuild it

Article 286 of the French General Tax Code requires anyone subject to it who records payments from private individuals to use an unalterable, secure, retained and archived till system. The law of February 19, 2026 restored individual vendor certification as proof of compliance, as an alternative to certification by an accredited body. But the consolidated BOFiP of March 25, 2026 closes the door in paragraph 375: when software ‘is developed by the taxable person themselves for their own needs’, compliance can only be proved by an accredited body's certificate. A restaurateur having a till built falls into this case, would need to go through COFRAC and risks €7,500 per application with sixty days to comply. Write it at the top of your requirements: the tool does not take payments.

Two of four vendors refuse to display a price

Lightspeed publishes its rates: Basic €89, Core €159 and Pro €249 monthly, additional till €49, with table ordering, kitchen display, reservations and inventory charged extra or reserved for higher tiers. SumUp also publishes: 1.75% per in-person payment without a subscription, Caisse Plus at €49 monthly excluding VAT, without setup fees or a monthly minimum. Zelty has no pricing page and requires a demonstration. L'Addition presents a quote configurator without a single amount. Restaurateurs therefore cannot compare before giving their phone number, which also prevents a five-year calculation.

On Trustpilot, L'Addition shows 4.2 out of 5 from 121 reviews, consulted September 2, 2026, and negative reviews repeat the same theme. Roll, July 21, 2026: ‘despite problems reported from installation, we received no serious assistance’. Marie, July 18, 2026, describes ‘several weeks of computer bugs, departments passing the buck and criticising one another, but zero solution’. At Lightspeed, Julien Monteiro quantifies another complaint on August 8, 2026: ‘Our subscription went from €1,548 to €2,244 annually, around a 45% increase’. Nobody disputes these vendors' work in payments and ordering; it is around those functions that the bill rises.

What remains open, and weighs heavily on margins

Everything that does not record a payment belongs to you. Recipe sheets and ingredient costs per dish, recalculated on every supplier price rise, with an alert when a dish's margin falls below the chef's threshold. Reading the till's Z report, imported daily, to compare revenue, ingredient ratios and payroll without duplicate entry. The digital hygiene log: temperatures, cleaning schedule, goods received and training certificates, ready for an unannounced inspection. Supplier orders generated from actual sales. Service schedules linked to expected demand, with kitchen-team cost per service. These are modules vendors separate from their plans and which currently live in a spreadsheet beside the till.

Reservations, customer records and the law

A reservation file and loyalty programme are personal-data processing in their own right: information at collection, free and explicit consent, access and erasure requests handled within thirty days, and a processing register whenever the processing is not occasional (Entreprendre portal, GDPR factsheet consulted September 2, 2026). This file is better kept in a tool you control than a service deciding for you. For invoicing, a restaurant serving mainly individuals must first be able to receive suppliers' electronic invoices, required for all businesses since September 1, 2026; issuing follows on September 1, 2027 for small organisations through an approved platform. Check your situation with your adviser.

The boundary written at the top of the brief

Tell agent Margaux the boundary at the interview's start: the tool reads the Z report; it records no payments. Victor then makes it an exclusion in the requirements rather than a footnote, and Félix turns it into a test failing if a payment-entry screen appears anywhere. Conversation then concerns your covers, suppliers and cost of goods; Amélie builds from there. Documents and code stay on your Mac. Allow an assistant subscription of around €20 monthly and a few euros in tokens, the same logic as for the tradesperson and their quote notebook. Maestro costs nothing during beta, and entry is by invitation.

Where to start

Take the menu and three random dishes. Calculate their ingredient costs using this month's supplier prices, then those from a year ago. If the difference surprises you, you already know where to start, and that the till has nothing to do with it. Describe that calculation, your recipe sheets and hygiene log to an agent team, and read the requirements before signing with anyone.