Is eZee BurrP the right POS for a Nigerian restaurant?

eZee BurrP is a restaurant point of sale program you install on a Windows computer in your own restaurant. It has been around a long time, it is used in a lot of countries, and it comes from a hospitality software house that also sells hotel systems. This article covers what it does, what running it in Nigeria actually involves, what has changed about who owns it, and the part of a Nigerian restaurant's day it was never built to handle.

What eZee BurrP is

The short version: a desktop restaurant pos system. You buy a licence, an installer sets it up on a PC behind your counter, and the data lives on that machine or on a small server in the building. Staff take orders on a touch screen or an ordinary desktop, tickets go to a kitchen printer, and a back office program produces reports.

The maker was eZee Technosys, an Indian company that is now part of Yanolja Cloud Solution. The old product website no longer serves its own page. Type the eZee BurrP address and you arrive at Yanolja Cloud Solution's POS platform page, which describes a cloud product with offline mode, QR ordering for rooms and tables, inventory linked to recipes and a waiter app.

The desktop product has not vanished. The company's support portal still lists "eZee BurrP FAQ's" alongside "Nextgen Support (On-Premise / Offline Software)", so the on-premise pos line is still supported. What you can read from those two pages together is where the company's attention now sits, and that is a fair thing to know before you sign anything.

What it is genuinely good at

Give the product its due, because a lot of it is real.

It handles a floor. Table maps, splitting a bill, moving a guest from the bar to a table, shift handovers. Software written for hotels tends to be careful about this, because hotel food and beverage is fussy.

It prints where the food is made. Different printers for the grill and the bar is ordinary, not an upgrade.

It works when the internet does not. This is the honest advantage of any on-premise system and it matters in Nigeria. If the line drops, the counter keeps taking money because nothing it needs is on the far side of a connection.

It belongs to a suite. If you also run rooms, a hotel front desk system from the same company will talk to it, and posting a restaurant bill to a room is a solved problem rather than a project.

What running it in Nigeria actually involves

Now the parts that do not appear in a feature table.

A computer you own and look after. The machine under the counter is yours. Its heat, its dust, its hard drive. When it fails, the menu, the prices and the sales history fail with it unless somebody has been taking backups off the premises. In a Lagos kitchen that machine also lives through power that comes and goes, and a desktop that loses power mid-write is how databases get corrupted.

An installer, and then a person who can help. Somebody has to set the system up, connect the printers and configure the tax settings. Then somebody has to be reachable when it stops on a Saturday. In a market where the vendor is not local, that person is usually a reseller, and the quality of your experience is really the quality of that reseller.

Licence and version decisions. Desktop software has versions. Somebody has to decide when to upgrade and then carry out the upgrade, on your own hardware, without breaking the thing that was working.

Tax that is about to get stricter. Nigeria's standard VAT rate is 7.5%, raised from 5% on 1 February 2020, and the same guide notes that taxable persons must put a fiscalisation system in place for VAT and file real time or scheduled returns once the revenue service deploys the technology. A register sitting on a computer in your restaurant will have to be brought into that. Ask any supplier how they plan to handle it, and treat a vague answer as an answer.

None of this makes on-premise software a bad choice. It makes it a choice with a staffing plan attached. We set out the wider version of this trade in the guide to cloud based restaurant pos systems.

The half of the day no register sees

Here is the bigger point, and it applies to every product in this category rather than to eZee BurrP in particular.

A register serves the person standing in front of it. In Nigeria a large and growing share of a restaurant's orders never involve anybody standing anywhere near a counter. They arrive as messages. Someone asks whether you deliver to their estate, sends a list, asks the total, sends a location. A member of staff reads all of that, writes it on a pad or types it into the register, and hopes nothing was misheard.

Every one of those orders was taken twice: once by the customer, once by your team. The second time is unpaid work done during a rush by somebody who is also meant to be doing something else. And because the register only ever saw the finished sale, no report will ever tell you how much of the evening went into it.

"The question I ask an owner is not what their software does. It is what happens between a customer deciding to order and the kitchen finding out. In most restaurants I have sat in, the answer is a person with a phone in one hand, and no software anybody bought was involved in it at all."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

What Get Menu covers instead

Get Menu is not a register and does not try to replace one. It is the ordering half. If eZee BurrP is running your counter well, leave it there. Here is what sits beside it.

Your restaurant gets an ordering address of its own. It sits on getmenu.ae and is included from the first day. There are 12 page layouts, plus colour themes and a font picker, so a suya spot and a quiet dining room need not resemble each other. Guests open it the way they open any web page.

Table codes, printed properly. A code is produced for each table and styled in a designer so it carries your brand, then the finished print pack arrives in your inbox ready for a printer. Because the code already knows the table, nobody types a number. Several phones around one table can build a single bill together.

Nothing arrives at the kitchen half decided. Add-ons and options have prices of their own. Any choice you mark as compulsory must be made before the item enters the basket. At the instant of ordering, every line is priced again from the menu as it stands, and pressing the button twice will not create a second order.

Portions count themselves down. Say how many exist and the figure drops with each order. Options carry their own figures, so one sauce running dry does not take the whole dish with it. Zero greys the item out unattended, a warning reaches you once when your chosen level is passed, a cancellation returns the portions, and a movement list explains every figure on the screen.

Your team hears about it in the group chat. Within roughly 2 seconds of a customer pressing the button, a confirmation reaches them, a ticket reaches the managers' group and a dispatch note reaches the riders' group. The rider's note carries the map pin the customer dropped. All 3 messages are recorded, whether or not they arrived.

Where to actually go. Rather than describing an estate over a call, the customer picks a building and a unit from a list and drops a pin. You can charge a different delivery fee for each building, and switch on free delivery above a figure you choose.

Something that brings people back. A stamp can be awarded per order or per amount spent. Regulars climb into tiers, and a tier can carry an automatic discount of its own. Rewards run out if they are not used, which is the point of them. The card sits in Google Wallet and refreshes itself, with nothing to download. Apple's version exists and is waiting on a certificate.

Offers with a ceiling on them. A coupon can be capped, restricted to certain items and given an end date. Any three items can be bundled at one price. Two discounts never combine by accident, because only the better one applies. A regular who has gone quiet can be sent a win-back.

Paperwork that leaves with you. Each invoice shows your registration number and downloads as a PDF without anybody logging in, and the numbering never skips. Sales and customer records come out as a spreadsheet whenever you ask for them, and old order details are cleared automatically after 120 days.

The 15 days of trial need no card details, and after that the charge is one monthly figure, with 0% of your sales going anywhere else.

The two side by side

The row that decides most arguments is the second one. These are not two versions of the same purchase.

What Get Menu does not do

Say it plainly. It is not a counter register, so walk-in sales are still handled by whatever you use today. It has no ingredient or recipe level inventory, no suppliers and no purchase orders. It does not connect to a hotel front desk. And it takes no payment online, so payment is cash or your own card machine when the food arrives, which also means there are no card details anywhere in the system.

How to decide

If your business is mostly people sitting down, if you have a technical person or a reseller you trust, and if power and internet make you nervous about anything hosted, a desktop register is a sound choice and eZee BurrP is a serious one.

If most of the pressure in your evening comes from messages, then a bigger register will not relieve it, because a register was never looking at that pile. Our guide to an online ordering system for restaurants covers what to look for, and the piece on what a restaurant pos really covers explains why the two purchases get confused so often.

Many restaurants end up running both, and that is a perfectly good answer.

Frequently asked questions

Is eZee BurrP cloud based or installed?

It is a desktop product installed on a Windows computer in the restaurant. Yanolja Cloud Solution, which now owns eZee, lists it in its support portal under on-premise and offline software, while its main POS platform page describes a cloud product.

Can Get Menu replace eZee BurrP?

Not at the counter. What Get Menu takes over is the customer side: the menu itself, the basket, the address, the group-chat messages, portion counts, stamps and the sales figures afterwards. A common arrangement in Lagos is a register on the counter for people who walk in, and an ordering page for the phone.

What happens to my orders when the internet is down?

An installed register keeps working and Get Menu does not, because it is a web page. In practice most Nigerian restaurants keep taking walk-in orders on the register and the phone during an outage, and the ordering page resumes when the connection does.

Can customers pay online?

No. Payment is cash or your own card machine when the food arrives. No card details are collected or stored anywhere in the system.

How long does it take to start?

Usually one day. A menu that already exists as a spreadsheet can be uploaded whole, which removes the typing that puts most owners off. The 15 days of trial begin without any card details being requested.