Next Restaurant turns a Joomla site into the system that runs the restaurant. Back of house, it handles the menu and modifiers, orders from every channel, a live kitchen display, a full-service point of sale, bookings on a floor plan you draw to match your room, delivery dispatch, recipe-driven inventory and a payments ledger. Front of house, your own site carries the menu, online ordering and checkout, table booking, gift card balance lookup, reviews, and scan-to-order at the table.

Where most restaurants run four or five disconnected systems, Next Restaurant is one order pipeline. A QR order at table 12, a delivery order from the website and a check rung up at the counter are the same record — routed to the same kitchen stations, depleting the same stock, settling into the same ledger, and landing in the same end-of-day report. Thirteen functional modules can be switched off individually, sixteen feature areas carry per-action permissions, and lean staff terminals put the POS, kitchen, pickup, waiter, host and time-clock screens on tablets without a Joomla login.

🎯 Use cases

• 🍽️ Replace the restaurant tech stack — booking widget, ordering portal, POS and stock spreadsheet become one component, on your own site.
• 📱 Take orders commission-free — online ordering and QR scan-to-order on your own domain, with no marketplace between you and your guest.
• 📅 Manage bookings against real capacity — an availability engine over your opening hours, your tables and your existing diary.
• 👨‍🍳 Run the kitchen on screens — stations, routing rules and line-level bumping instead of a ticket printer.
• 💳 Settle everything in one ledger — PayPal, cash, card terminal, bank transfer and on-account, with refunds and CSV export.
• 🏪 Run more than one venue — per-location hours, pricing, stock, staff and terminals from a single install.

💡 Benefits

• 🔗 One order, every channel — website, QR table, POS, phone and delivery write the same record, so kitchen routing, stock and reporting never fork.
• 💸 No per-order commission — orders arrive on your own site, and the customer relationship stays yours.
• 🧩 Only the parts you need — thirteen modules switch off individually, with dependent modules greying out automatically and their endpoints refused, not just hidden.
• 🔐 Staff see their own job — sixteen feature areas with per-action grants, enforced on the server, plus terminals restrictable by staff, role and location.
• 📊 Numbers you can act on — sales, top items, payment breakdown, channel mix, labour cost and ingredient usage, all from the same data.
• 🧾 Every adjustment on record — voids, comps, discounts, cancellations and refunds behind a manager PIN and written to an audit log.
• 🔄 Upgrade-safe & open source — GPL licensed, namespaced Joomla 4 / 5 / 6 MVC on PHP 8.1+, delivered through Joomla's native update channel.

🧩 Features

🍽️ Menu Management

Build the menu once and publish it everywhere.
- Items & categories — pricing, imagery, availability windows and per-location overrides
- Modifier groups — reusable option sets with min/max rules and per-option price deltas
- Allergens & dietary tags — surfaced on the public menu and printed on the kitchen ticket
- Image cropping & galleries — crop in the item editor, plus a separate venue gallery
- 86 an item — pull it from every ordering channel at once, from the POS or the admin

🛒 Ordering

One pipeline, however the guest orders.
- Online ordering — cart, modifiers and checkout for pickup, delivery or dine-in
- QR scan-to-order — per-table codes; no app, no account, straight to the kitchen
- POS, phone & counter — staff raise orders on the same record type
- Order corrections — cancel, modify, remake, comp, discount and refund, PIN-gated and audited
- Guest self-cancel — within a configurable window, before the kitchen starts

🧾 Point of Sale

A POS built for a full service, not a cash-up screen.
- Open checks — held across a service with rounds appended as the table goes
- Seats, splits & transfers — split evenly or by seat, and move a check to another table or server
- Discounts, voids & comps — line and check level, behind a manager PIN, all logged
- Payments & receipts — cash, card or on-account; print or email; refunds
- Cash drawer — open, count and reconcile with an auditable session record

👨‍🍳 Kitchen Display

Screens the kitchen can actually work from.
- Live board — tickets from every channel with elapsed timers and colour-coded urgency
- Stations & routing rules — send a line to grill, fry, pass or bar by category, item or order type
- Line-level bumping — a long cook no longer blocks the rest of the ticket
- Cancellation alerts — a banner that stays up until a cook acknowledges it

📅 Reservations & Floor

Bookings that respect the room you actually have.
- Availability engine — slots offered against opening hours, table capacity and existing bookings
- Drawable floor maps — per-floor canvases with tables, chairs, areas, rotation and zoom
- Operate vs Layout modes — design the room, or run service with live occupancy on the same map
- Guest notifications — HTML confirmation, reminder and status-change emails from a state machine
- Host & waiter screens — seat parties and take orders from the floor on a tablet

🚚 Delivery

Run your own delivery instead of renting a marketplace's.
- Zones — with their own fees, minimum order values and delivery windows
- Driver roster — assignment and dispatch state per order
- Dispatch board — what's cooking, what's ready and what's on the road

📦 Inventory

Know what you're using and what it costs.
- Stock items — per location, with units, par levels and low-stock alerts
- Recipe-driven depletion — selling a dish draws down its ingredients, on every channel
- Movement ledger — every receipt, depletion, waste event and adjustment, traceable
- Waste log & auto-86 — log waste with a reason; pull items when an ingredient runs out

💳 Payments

Take money through the provider you already use.
- Provider registry — PayPal, plus cash, card terminal, bank transfer, voucher, on-account and pay-on-arrival (Stripe, Adyen, Square, SumUp, gift card and loyalty ship as Coming soon)
- Webhook-backed redirects — a settlement survives the guest closing the browser tab
- Transactions ledger — every capture, refund and adjustment, filterable, with CSV export
- Refunds — full or partial, back through the original provider, recorded against the order

👥 Staff & Terminals

Put the right screen in the right hands.
- Roles & permissions — sixteen feature areas with per-action grants, enforced on the server
- Staff terminals — lean POS, KDS, pickup, waiter, host and clock-in screens
- Device token + PIN — no Joomla login; restrictable per terminal by staff, role and location
- Time clock — clock in and out, breaks, timesheet and labour-cost reporting

🛡️ Security

Next Restaurant handles orders, payments and staff access, so it is built to Joomla's security best practices throughout.

• 🔒 Behind the Joomla session, by default — admin requests require an authenticated session and a valid security token; the public API is opt-in and off out of the box.
• 🚦 Fail-closed access control — controllers declare the features they read and write, and the dispatcher refuses anything that doesn't; a controller that declares nothing gets no accidental pass.
• 🧮 Totals recomputed server-side — prices, modifiers and discounts are recalculated from your own records, so a tampered request can't buy at the wrong price.
• 🎟️ Narrow guest sessions — a QR guest can only act on their own table's order, and the session expires.
• 🔑 Credentials never exposed — payment provider secrets are stripped from API responses, and card data never reaches your server.
• 🧾 Privileged actions audited — voids, comps, discounts, corrections and refunds are recorded with the manager who authorised them.
• ✅ Continuously verified — an automated end-to-end suite and static analysis run on every change.

🔗 Resources

📚 Documentation - https://nextsoftware.dev/documentation/next-restaurant
📝 Changelog - https://nextsoftware.dev/changelogs/next-restaurant