Zoho POS for Restaurants: Features and the Free ₹12 Lakh Plan

What is Zoho POS for restaurants?

Zoho POS has existed for a while as a general retail point of sale. The restaurant edition, launched on September 23, 2026, adds what food businesses need and a retail POS does not: tables, kitchen tickets, modifiers ("no onion, extra spicy"), recipes and aggregator orders.

It is a cloud POS, so the menu, sales and stock live online. That matters most when you have more than one outlet: change a price once and it updates at every counter and on Swiggy and Zomato.

Zoho POS restaurant features

Orders and tables

• Dine-in, takeaway and aggregator orders in one queue.
• A live table view showing which tables are free, occupied or waiting for the bill, with orders linked to each table.
• An Android waiter app for taking orders at the table.
• QR-code digital menus and self-service ordering kiosks.

Kitchen and menu

• Orders route automatically to the right kitchen station, with modifiers and quantities.
• One central menu that stays the same across every outlet and channel.
• Recipe-based inventory, so selling a dish deducts its ingredients.

Billing and reports

• GST-ready invoices, printed at the counter or through a self-checkout kiosk.
• Split payments across cash, card, UPI and bank transfer.
• A live dashboard with top-selling items and filterable sales reports.
• Catering and event orders handled in the same system.

Zoho POS also connects to Zia Agents and the Zoho MCP server for automating routine tasks. Once Zoho Zia Chatopens up, you should be able to ask questions such as "which dishes sold least this week?" in plain English.

The free ₹12 lakh plan explained

Zoho says Zoho POS for Restaurants is free for businesses with annual billing up to ₹12 lakh. That is roughly ₹1 lakh a month, or about ₹3,300 a day: the size of a small café, tea stall, bakery counter or single-brand cloud kitchen.

Zoho's restaurant pricing page calls it "free forever" for businesses billing up to ₹12 lakh a year. The free plan gives you one register and one management user, with counter and offline billing, items with variants and modifiers, kitchen order tickets, customer records, inventory, real-time reports, payments and GST-compliant invoices.

Many outlets under ₹12 lakh are below the GST registration threshold, but having GST-ready billing from day one means nothing changes when you grow past it. Check your own position with your accountant.

Zoho POS for restaurants pricing

Zoho POS for Restaurants has its own price list, separate from the retail Zoho POS plans (which start at ₹649). These are India list prices per location per month; annual billing works out cheaper than monthly.

A café or takeaway counter that lives on Swiggy and Zomato orders fits Essentials. A sit-down restaurant needs Signature, because that is where table service, the waiter app and recipe-based prep start; it is the plan Zoho marks as most popular. Premium is for larger operations that want self-service kiosks, loyalty programmes and ERP integration. Every plan has a 15-day free trial. For how POS fits into a wider Zoho budget, see our Zoho pricing guide.

Hardware and setup

You do not need to buy new equipment. Zoho POS runs on Windows for billing and back-office work and on Android for the waiter app, and supports the hardware most restaurants already own: thermal receipt printers, cash drawers, customer-facing displays, barcode scanners, weighing scales (useful for bakeries and sweet shops) and card terminals.

Setup is mostly menu work: entering dishes, modifiers, kitchen stations and recipes. Getting recipes right takes the longest and is what makes the inventory numbers trustworthy.

Who Zoho POS for restaurants suits, and who should look elsewhere

Zoho lists casual dining, quick service, cafés, bakeries and food trucks. It is a strong fit if:

• You run a small counter or café billing under ₹12 lakh a year and want a proper POS without a monthly fee.
• A large share of your orders come through Swiggy and Zomato and you are tired of re-entering them (Essentials and above).
• You run two or more outlets and want one menu and one sales view.
• You already use Zoho Books or Zoho One and want sales to flow into your accounts.

Look harder at alternatives if you depend on a feature Zoho has not listed, such as a specific hotel-property-management integration, or if your current POS is deeply tied to a franchise system.

A restaurant that also sells packaged goods or runs a retail counter should read our Zoho for Retail guide, which covers the RetailIQ loyalty CRM that sits alongside Zoho POS.

Connecting the POS to your accounts

A POS on its own gives you sales numbers. The real benefit of staying on Zoho is that those sales, purchases and stock movements can flow into Zoho Books for GST returns and profit-and-loss, without exporting spreadsheets every month.

If you run several outlets in Kerala and want POS, accounts and inventory set up properly from day one, we do this as a Zoho partner in Kerala.