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For restaurants who want their wait staff to fully handle orders and payment at the customer's table, few point-of-sale (POS) software solutions are more tablet-friendly than Menusoft Systems Digital Dining, which begins at $1, 100 per terminal. The company bills its software as a POS offering that's "simple to use" and that "goes way beyond the basics." As far as customers are concerned, it delivers—for the most part—on those promises. However, a few kinks in its e-commerce and back-end reporting capabilities may not make it the best fit for every customer.

When it works properly, tablet-based serving can deliver far more speed and efficiency than a traditional wait staff approach. "The server can take drink orders and send them to the bar while talking about specials, the initial spiel, " said Maciej Wojcicki, Vice President for Information Services at the B&B Hospitality Group, which handles chef Mario Batali's 30 full-service Italian restaurants. Before his move to Menusoft Systems Digital Dining, Wojcicki described how servers would take the entire order, walk it back to the kitchen area, and enter it manually into the POS—a major time hog that only got worse the busier the restaurant became.

That's a key reason that several POS and restaurant software manufacturers have made big moves into tablet-based and mobile-optimized solutions over the past year. Menusoft Systems Digital Dining is certainly not the only POS vendor pushing its mobile support, even in this review roundup, as customers of Posera Maitre'D POS can attest.

Mobility Makes Kitchen Lives Easier
The wait staff "can also sell two rounds of drinks and pay at the table. The card never gets out of sight of the customer, " said Wojcicki. "This is the best feature of Menusoft Systems Digital Dining. The others don't have that working very well."