F&B POS in Saudi Arabia: what to check before you buy

A restaurant in Riyadh shopping for an F&B POS is usually shown one product with one price. It is really three separate purchases wearing the same box: something that takes the order, something that takes the money, and something that produces an invoice the tax authority will accept. Vendors bundle them because bundles sell. Separating them before you sign is how you avoid paying twice for one job and nothing for another.

Job one: taking the order

This is where food service stops behaving like a shop.

A shop sells a thing with a price. A kitchen sells a thing with questions attached: which size, which bread, how spicy, with what on the side, and is it for here or going out. Retail software handles that badly because it was built for a barcode, and a barcode has no opinions.

An F&B system has to hold options and add-ons with their own prices, mark some choices required so an order cannot reach the pass unfinished, and know when something has run out. It also has to do that at the speed of a queue.

Job two: taking the payment

This job is not really your software vendor's. Card acceptance belongs to your bank or your payment provider, and the machine on your counter is a regulated device with its own contract.

Cards matter here. The Saudi Central Bank publishes weekly point of sale figures, and for the week ending 13 December 2025 restaurants and cafes reached SAR 1.73 billion, up 3.7 percent on the week, with transaction numbers up 3.2 percent, inside a national total of $3.54 billion. People here pay by card at the counter as a matter of habit.

That is worth knowing when a vendor implies their software is what makes card payment possible. It is not. Your bank is.

Job three: the invoice ZATCA expects

This is the job people discover last and it is the one with a deadline attached.

Saudi Arabia's e-invoicing rules came in two stages. ZATCA's own page describes Phase 1, generation, enforced from 4 December 2021, requiring taxpayers to generate and store invoices through compliant electronic solutions, and Phase 2, integration, running in waves from 1 January 2023, which adds technical requirements and connects those solutions to ZATCA's systems. Taxpayers are told their wave at least six months in advance.

So one of your suppliers has to be a compliant e-invoicing solution. Be direct with every vendor about which one that is, because two of them will imply it and one of them will mean it.

We will be equally direct about ourselves in a moment.

Where our own product sits

Get Menu is the ordering half, and only that half.

The menu sits on your own address on getmenu.ae, included from the first day, with 12 page layouts and a font picker so the page reads the way your menu reads. Item names and descriptions can be written in Arabic as well as English. Upload the whole menu from a spreadsheet instead of typing it, then reorder categories and items by dragging.

Items carry options and add-ons with their own prices, and a choice can be marked required with limits the kitchen can trust. Every line is priced again from your live menu at checkout, so the total on the screen is the total at the door. Counts per item fall as orders arrive, and options carry counts of their own, so one finished sauce does not remove a whole dish from the page. Sold out flips itself at zero.

When an order lands, messages go out over WhatsApp: a confirmation to the customer, a ticket into your managers' group, and a dispatch link with the GPS pin dropped at checkout. Indoors, a code is generated for every table, so the ticket knows which table ordered without anybody typing a number. Groups at one table can order from their own phones onto one bill.

"We built the required choice first, before anything else in the item sheet. An order that reaches the kitchen with a question still open costs more than a slow page ever will." — Tanzeel ur Rehman, co-founder of Get Menu

What we do not do, stated plainly

We are not a ZATCA-integrated e-invoicing solution. The invoice we produce is a PDF carrying your tax registration number that a customer can download without logging in. It is useful, and it is not the same thing as a cleared or reported electronic invoice under Phase 2. Keep the compliant solution your accountant has chosen.

We also take no online payments. Payment is cash or your card machine at the door, which means there are no card details anywhere in the product. We do not sell a terminal, drive a receipt printer, or track ingredients down to the gram.

How to compare without a feature table

Ask each vendor four questions and write down the answers.

Which of the three jobs does this actually do? What happens on the day I leave, and can I take my customer list with me? Does the price change when my orders go up? And who pays when a customer is charged the wrong amount because the price on the screen was not the price in the menu?

That last one sounds unfair. It is the question that separates systems that re-price at checkout from systems that trust whatever the screen was showing.

Write the four answers side by side on one sheet of paper. The bundle that looked cheapest often turns out to be answering one job well and two badly, and the sheet makes that obvious in a way a demonstration never does.

Keeping the customer after the first order

An F&B POS that only rings up sales leaves the second visit to chance. Stamps turn into rewards, regulars grow into tiers, and the card lives in Google Wallet with no app to install. Ten kinds of upsell are available, from pairings to quantity ladders and spend thresholds, and coupons carry caps, exclusions and expiry dates so a promotion ends when you meant it to. A sales dashboard shows what sold by day and by item.

For more, POS systems for F&B covers the general buying question, POS comparisons covers how to score vendors, and restaurant POS software covers the software side on its own. You get 15 days to try the ordering half with no card asked for at signup.

Frequently asked questions

What does F&B POS actually mean?

Point of sale software built for food and beverage rather than retail. The difference is that it understands choices, add-ons, required options and items that run out mid-service.

Does Get Menu handle ZATCA e-invoicing?

No. It produces a PDF invoice carrying your tax registration number, which is not the same as a compliant Phase 2 electronic invoice. You still need the e-invoicing solution your accountant chose.

How do customers pay?

Cash or a card machine when the food arrives. Nothing is charged on the page, and the product holds no card details.

Can I keep my existing cash register?

Yes. Nothing here replaces the counter. It adds an ordering page that customers use themselves, and the orders arrive as messages to phones your team already carries.

Can the menu be in Arabic?

Yes. Item names and descriptions can be written in Arabic alongside English.