For bars
Eight rounds, one trip to the till.
In a bar nobody orders once. They order every twenty minutes until closing, and each round currently means somebody walking to a table, listening to six people over the music, and walking to the bar. Klevra removes the walk, not the person.
Rounds stop going through anyone
The table opens the menu on a phone and sends whatever they want next. It reaches whoever is carrying that table and, once they approve it, appears on the screen at the bar. Your bartender reads it instead of hearing it shouted. Nobody tours the room asking whether anyone wants another.
The tab stays open until they leave
They order all evening on the same tab and the arithmetic happens once, at the end. Whoever turns up at eleven joins with a short four-character code, read out loud over the music, or scans the same sticker. Two tabs can run on one table, for the four people at one end who have nothing to do with the three at the other.
- Every item carries the name of whoever asked for it.
- When the gin runs out you mark it unavailable and it disappears from the menu immediately.
- If you want every order seen by a person first, that is a setting. If the bar is too busy for that, switch it off.
The music is loud and nobody can hear you
That is what the call button is for. Not for drinks, which are ordered from the menu, but for what is not on the menu: a broken glass, a question, the bill. The request appears on the phones of whoever is on shift, with the table number. Nobody waves across the room and nobody has to pretend they did not see it.
At one in the morning, who drank what
This is where evenings go wrong. Seven people, four rounds, a crumpled receipt and somebody insisting they never had the third shot. Each guest sees their own share already worked out and pays it, with their own card. As people pay, everyone else sees what is left, so no round is settled twice and none is left behind. In a study by Gneezy, Haruvy and Yafe published in the Economic Journal in 2004, 80% of people preferred to pay for exactly what they consumed rather than split the bill evenly. Anyone who still wants to settle the lot at the counter carries on doing that.
What stays exactly as it is now
The till. We do not replace it and we do not touch it. Your staff register the sale once for that table, at settlement, and the receipt prints from your own system as always. We keep between 0.5% and 1% on payments taken online, and nothing on cash or on cards tapped at your own counter.
There is no direct connection to till systems, so the sale is still registered by hand, once per table. Nor does this stand in for someone behind the bar: the order reaches the right place faster, but a person still makes it.
Also worth reading
Tonight could be the last night with the notepad.
Make an account, photograph your drinks list, put the codes on the tables.