Restaurant management software in Tunisia: what it does and what to ask

Restaurant management software is the layer above the till. A till tells you what you sold. Management software tells you what each sale earned, what is left on the shelf and what you owe. This guide explains what the category does, follows one dish through it in Tunisian dinars, and lists what to ask a vendor. Tracer’s own plans come at the end, with what it does not do. If you only need sales and hardware, read our restaurant POS guide first.

What does restaurant management software do?

Each module answers a question an owner asks every week.

The value is in the links between modules. Separate tools each give you a true number, and none of them tells you the margin.

One ojja followed through the system

Take one ojja merguez sold at 22.000 DT excluding VAT. Prices are examples. A point separates the millimes, so 6.730 DT is six dinars and 730 millimes.

Now the merguez supplier moves from 28.000 to 32.000 DT per kilo. The 150 g portion goes from 4.200 to 4.800 DT. The ojja now costs 7.330 DT and its margin falls to 14.670 DT.

That is 0.600 DT, easy to miss on a single plate. At 20 ojjas a day over 26 days, it is 520 × 0.600 = 312.000 DT a month gone with no change on your menu. A linked system shows it when the invoice is entered. A spreadsheet shows it if someone remembers to update the cell. The arithmetic behind this example is in our food cost formula guide.

Spreadsheet or software: a simple test

A spreadsheet is a fair start. Our rule of thumb, which you should adapt to your business, is to keep it while all three of these are true:

1. You have one location, and one person enters every purchase.
2. Your recipes are up to date, and you can name the date of your last price change.
3. You can state last month’s food cost within a week of the month ending.

If one fails, your file is producing confident wrong numbers. Before you decide, test a few dishes for free with the food cost calculator (in French).

Questions to ask any software vendor in Tunisia

Ask these in writing. Vague answers usually mean a problem you will find during a busy service.

• Currency: does it show dinars with three decimals, on screen and on tickets?
• Connection: when the internet drops, which actions keep working and which stop?
• Hardware: will the thermal printers you own work, and through what?
• Language: which languages does the interface offer? Check this against your staff, not only against yourself.
• Supplier invoices: can it record the extra lines that appear on Tunisian invoices?
• Delivery: does it show your profit per channel after commission, for Glovo for example?
• Price: is the amount tax included, and is it billed monthly or annually?
• Setup: who enters the first recipes, and is that charged?

If you are still at the planning stage, price the software in your budget for opening a restaurant in Tunisia or for opening a cafe. If the kitchen is your weak point, read about kitchen display systems.

What Tracer does, plan by plan

Tracer is restaurant management software made in Tunis by AYV Studio. It is a web app that runs in a browser, with a desktop app for printing and the local network. Prices include tax and are billed annually.

In practice, Tracer covers:

• Till: dine-in tables, take-away and delivery orders, split bills, split payments, client debts, held carts, and permissions per user.
• Connection cuts: sales queue locally and sync when the line returns. Opening or closing a cash session and voiding a sale need a connection.
• Recipes and stock: sub-recipes with automatic costing and cost history, low stock alerts, physical counts with variance, and waste tracking.
• Purchases: per-supplier prices, extra charges such as the fiscal stamp and withholding, and supplier balances.
• Finance: P&L, VAT report, expenses, client invoices, and profit by delivery channel after commission.
• Also included in the product: temperature logs, reservations and multi-site reporting.

What Tracer does not do. The interface is in French and English, with no Arabic version. It has no QR menu ordering, no online ordering and no loyalty programme. If your plan depends on one of these, count that as a gap and solve it another way.