Four shutters, four branches, one login.
In RestoMama nothing smaller than a branch owns money. A food court counter in Kochi — top floor at Lulu Edappally, or the ground floor of an Infopark block — is therefore a branch in its own right: one till, one cash drawer, one collecting account, and three letters at the front of every bill number it prints.
- A branch for every shutter, on the Multi-Branch add-on
- One cash drawer per counter, per business date
- Reports, expenses and staff read one counter at a time
The unit is the counter.
Everything the platform has to attribute to somebody hangs off a branch: the bill number, the till, the drawer, the collecting account, the printer pair, the availability of a dish, the roster, the screen on the wall. There is nothing beneath a branch to hang them off instead, which is exactly why a counter has to be one.
- Its own three letters at the front of the bill number, taken from the counter’s own name.
- Its own cash drawer, one per business date, with last night’s count carried in as the float.
- Its own collecting UPI account, set on that counter’s order settings and printed on its receipt.
- Its own pair of printers, so a ticket raised at this shutter cannot surface at the shutter next door.
- Its own availability: a dish sold out here keeps selling next door, and may carry a different price here.
- Its own name, logo and FSSAI number on the receipt, so two counters under one operator read as two businesses on paper.
- Its own roster: one role per person per counter, and attendance recorded where the shift was worked.
An organisation holds exactly one branch until Multi-Branch Controls is switched on, and the ceiling after that is a number that was sold — a quota checked when a branch is created, not a line on a plan page. Four shutters means four branches, so it is the first thing to settle and not the last.
Branches
One address · Sat 16 AugNobody waits for a table here.
The seating between the shutters belongs to the mall, and so do the tray return and the wash area. That one fact takes several modules off the table, and the honest thing is to name them rather than leave them on a list.
The sentence that makes this page work sets its limit as well. Anything you want attributed to one counter works, because a counter is a branch. Anything that would need a unit smaller than a branch is not there to switch on, and a food court is the one operation where a competitor will promise it anyway.
- No guest queue, no waitlist, no party size, no table-ready message. A table in RestoMama hangs off a branch, so a shutter would have to claim seating that belongs to the mall.
- No single bill across three shutters. An order carries exactly one branch and there is no shared basket beneath it, so a guest who wants biryani and a juice pays twice, at two counters.
- No call board on the concourse. A screen carries that counter’s menu, not a queue of numbers — the guest is told the order is ready on their own phone instead.
- No pagers or beepers, and nothing pretending to be one.
- No rent, commission or partner share paid out. Per-counter money is attributed by reading each counter’s own figures; payouts go to one nominated account, not to four.
- No stock moved between counters. Each counter’s shelf, its counts and its recorded waste are its own, and there is no screen that carries a sack of rice next door.
- Not four local pages for one mall address. Local SEO Pages gives an area to exactly one branch and refuses the second, which is precisely what four shutters at Edappally would ask of it.
A food court operator is the reader most likely to have been promised one of those by somebody else. If it is the one you are buying for, it is worth saying before the fourth shutter is set up rather than after.
Sold out at 13:40, at one counter only.
The biryani finishes before the shutter closes. The Arabian counter beside it has three hours of stock left. Availability is held per branch — enabled, sold out, time-windowed, or priced differently here — so marking it at this till does not touch the queue forty feet away, and an order for it is refused here and nowhere else.
Menu board
Counter Left · biryani counter · 13:41A screen is a slot, not a device
A board is a named screen slot at one counter — the platform’s own worked example is Counter Left — so two screens over one shutter are slot 1 and slot 2 and can never become each other. The TV shows a six-character code, you claim it once, and it runs a board built from that counter’s menu sections. Each screen reports whether it is online, and pages someone when one goes dark.
Half plate or full
A choice group carries required, a minimum selection, a cap on how many different choices and a cap on total quantity. A required single-select group is how a counter asks half or full before the ticket prints. Groups are built once and attached where they are needed, so one of them serves the biryani counter and the Arabian counter both.
One catalog, four slices
The four shutters sit behind a single catalog and each shows its own part of it. When you open a fifth, the menu arrives as a spreadsheet import rather than two evenings of typing at the counter.
Digital Menu Boards and Menu & Catalog, with the per-branch availability coming from Multi-Branch Controls.
Five ways in, and four of them end at the shutter.
A counter has no waiter and no table number. The guest queues at the shutter that has what they want, pays there, and stands there until it is handed over. Everything else below is a way of arriving before the guest does — an office worker on the ground floor at Infopark orders from the quiet side of the concourse and collects at the counter.
How orders arrived
Four counters · Sat 16 Aug- The counter tillWalk-up, queued at the shutter, paid there59458.2%
- Express Pickup QRPrinted for this counter, switched on one counter at a time14414.1%
- The storefrontThe guest picks the counter by name, then reads that counter’s menu999.7%
- WhatsAppOrdered in the app the guest already has open636.2%
- DeliveryThe only one that does not end at the shutter12011.8%
What replaces the pager
When the order is ready the guest is told on their own phone — WhatsApp, SMS, email or push. That is the honest answer to the beeper on the tray, and it is not a board calling numbers over the concourse, because no such board exists here.
The guest is standing right there
Which is when an order actually changes. An item added after the bill is placed prints a supplement ticket at that counter; one pulled prints a void chit. The pass and the drawer both see what happened, on the same order record.
Delivery, where the operator runs it, is the one arrival on that list which does not finish at the shutter. Nothing else on this page rests on it: the till, the pickup QR, the storefront and WhatsApp all end at the same three feet of counter. Online Ordering & QR is where the pickup side of that is switched on.
Each shutter counts its own drawer.
A food court counter is a separate business inside one operator’s books — often a separate rent, sometimes a separate partner taking a share. Daily Close does not report that separation, it enforces it: there is exactly one cash session per branch per business date, so the juice counter cannot end up sharing a close with the biryani counter even by accident.
Cash sessions
Sat 16 Aug · 23:12The gas cylinder belongs to one counter
Expenses are submitted and approved against a branch, so the juice counter’s cylinder does not land in the biryani counter’s month. That is the half of per-counter money no report can put right afterwards, because by then the two are already one number.
The digital half of the same split
The collecting account is set on that counter’s own order settings — PhonePe, Paytm or its own VPA — and its QR prints on that counter’s receipt, rather than everything landing in one pot to be untangled at month end. Where a shutter has its own partner, that is the difference between clean books and a monthly argument.
Daily Close and Payments & Wallet. Neither pays anyone out per shutter — see the list above — they keep the figures apart so you can read them apart.
Which shutter earns its rent.
At the end of the month the question is not what the operation took. It is which counter covered its own rent and which one is being carried — and the mall asks for the same figure, and so does the partner who owns the biryani counter and not the juice counter.
A comparison that does not flatter a slow counter
The per-branch comparison lists every active counter in scope over one date range — including one that took nothing at all — and ranks them on net sales. Counters with too thin a sample are pushed to the bottom rather than allowed to top a percentage, so a shutter that took nine orders never reads as the best one.
One window, every tab
The date range and the branch filter carry across the tabs, so the comparison and the menu-margin view are looking at the same fortnight. Nothing has to be exported to line them up by hand afterwards.
One counter at a time, in the reports
Reports follow the counter picked in the header switcher, and payments total by UPI account and by tender. Read one shutter, switch, read the next, over the same dates. The P&L buckets by day, week or month, which is the granularity a business made of two rushes is actually judged on.
The partner reads their counter and nothing else
A person holds one role per counter, so a cashier who covers two shutters on a Sunday holds two rows and moves between the tills. A manager assigned to some counters is narrowed to those counters even when they send no filter, and is refused one they were not assigned to. Extra grants and withdrawn grants sit on that person at that counter.
The audit mall management asks for
A landlord asks one counter for its opening checks in writing, and then asks the other three for the same thing on the same morning. Checks and temperature readings are scheduled by time of day and answered with readings and photographs; a reading outside its band is escalated, and the escalation is filed against whichever version of the written procedure applied that day rather than the one in force now.
Written once, published to the shutters you tick
Routine publishing runs the opposite way to availability: the opening-checks list is written once, previewed per counter and pushed to the branches you tick. Four near-identical lists maintained separately is how the fourth one quietly stops being done.
Attendance is recorded against the counter the shift was worked at, which is the only way a two-shutter cashier’s Sunday lands in the right place. See Business Intelligence, Dashboard & Reports, Staff & Roles and Attendance & Routines.
What a shutter actually runs on.
In the order a food court operator meets them. The first is the gate: without it there is one branch, and one branch cannot be four shutters.
Multi-Branch Controls
The gate. Without it an organisation holds one branch, and one branch cannot be four shutters. It is also what lets a counter go dark on its own at 13:40 while the queue forty feet away keeps buying.
Counter & Orders
The till at the shutter, its own paired printers, its own kitchen board, and the three letters at the front of every bill it raises.
Daily Close
One cash session per counter per business date, with last night’s count at that counter carried in as this morning’s float.
Payments & Wallet
Each counter collects into its own UPI account, and that counter’s QR prints on that counter’s receipt.
Dashboard & Reports
Scoped to the counter picked in the header, totalled by UPI account and by tender, bucketed by day, week or month.
Business Intelligence
The which-shutter-earns-its-rent screen: every counter in scope over one date range, ranked on net sales, with thin-sample counters pushed down.
Staff & Roles
One role per person per counter. The partner in the biryani counter reads the biryani counter; the operator reads all four.
Digital Menu Boards
A named screen slot at one counter, running that counter’s menu sections, with sold-out dishes leaving the board as they leave the till.
Menu & Catalog
One catalog behind four shutters, each showing its own slice, with choice groups built once and attached where they are needed.
Online Ordering & QR
Express Pickup switched on one counter at a time, and the ready notification to the guest’s own phone that replaces a pager.
Attendance & Routines
Attendance against the counter the shift was worked at, and the opening checks mall management asks to see in writing.
All modules · What a second counter costs · Running a single restaurant instead
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- One replyA person from the team, not an autoresponder sequence.
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- Billing and the counterOrder, modifiers, receipt, token
- The kitchen screenKOT routing, stations, prep state
- Payments and closingUPI, card, cash, wallet, day-end
- Dispatch and payoutsZones, assignment, tracking, settlement