Choosing restaurant management software in Algeria

A percentage of every order and a flat subscription can't be compared on their headline price. They're compared on what happens when you succeed.

With commission, the more you sell the more you pay: a good night costs more than a quiet one, and the cost rises exactly as your volume rises. With a subscription, the cost is known in advance and doesn't move with service.

Run it on your own numbers: 5% commission on 400,000 DA of monthly orders is 20,000 DA. Compare that with a flat subscription, then redo the sum for Ramadan or a match night.

Ask directly: "do you take a percentage of my orders?" An evasive answer is an answer.

The second hidden cost is hardware. Free software that requires two tablets, a kitchen screen and a network printer isn't free: it's invoiced once, in foreign currency, with maintenance on you.

• Ask for the complete list of what must be bought to start.
• Ask what happens if a device fails on a Friday night: who replaces it, how fast, at what cost.
• Check whether the system runs on the phones your staff already own. That's the difference between starting tomorrow and starting in three months.
• Be wary of proprietary hardware: it ties you to the vendor long after the subscription ends.

Your dining room speaks Arabic and French, often in the same sentence. Software that only exists in French has two concrete consequences: some of your guests read a menu they don't fully understand, and some of your staff work in a language that isn't theirs.

Check three things separately, because a vendor can tick "Arabic" having translated only the welcome screen: the guest-facing menu, the staff-facing interface, and the reading direction. An Arabic interface still aligned left wasn't translated — it was run through a machine translator.

Ask for a demo in Arabic. It's the fastest and most revealing test there is.

Feature grids are long because they're designed to impress. Here's the order in which those features matter for a dine-in restaurant.

If the first four rows don't work flawlessly, the rest won't make up for it.

The answers to those seven questions will tell you more than an hour-long demo.

• Do you take a percentage of my orders?
• What hardware do I have to buy to start?
• Does the interface exist in Arabic, on both the guest and staff sides?
• Who owns my data, and how do I get it back if I leave?
• If I stop paying, do I lose access to my history?
• How long until I'm operational, starting from zero?
• Is there a minimum term, and what happens if I want to stop after two months?

Qweko covers the dining room: QR menu, ordering from the table, an order board, staff roles, and delivery or pickup if you need them. No commission on orders, no hardware to buy, in Arabic, French and English.

What Qweko does not do, and it's better to know upfront: no detailed stock management, no accounting, no table reservations. If one of those three is your main need, another tool will serve you better.

Subscriptions start at 2,100 DA per month on a 12-month plan (2,800 DA paying monthly, no commitment). You can test on a single table before rolling it out across the floor.