Updated · 6 min read
Restaurant booking and till: what do they really cost?
An independent restaurant in France that wants to take bookings and check guests out properly pays today for two or three tools that don’t talk to each other. Here are the three ways of doing it — the paper diary, two separate subscriptions, one single tool — with the published figures, the limits of each, and the questions to ask before signing anything.
Option 1: the paper diary and a simple till
Software cost: zero. That is its only real quality. A diary keeps no guest history, tracks no no-shows, and makes the staff retype every reservation by hand. Above all, a “simple” till is not enough: in France, every till system used by a VAT-registered business must meet the conditions of article 286 I-3° bis of the CGI — in practice, NF525 certification. Taking payments with an uncertified tool exposes the restaurant to a tax reassessment, not just an inconvenience. The paper diary’s saving is paid back in risk and in lost time at every service.
Option 2: booking software plus a separate certified till
This is the most common setup, and the most expensive one. On the booking side, Zenchef’s management plan is listed from €169/month; TheFork works differently, with a per-cover fee on bookings coming from its network. On the till side, you add the subscription of an NF525-certified system — Lightspeed Restaurant, SumUp POS Pro (formerly Tiller), Zelty… — billed every month per terminal. And between the two sits an integration to maintain: the one linking Zenchef to SumUp POS Pro loses support at the end of 2026, leaving the restaurants concerned with no automatic path from booking to till.
The real cost is not the sum of the subscriptions. It is the table retyped into the till because the two tools share nothing, the guest the till doesn’t know when the bill is printed, and the integration that breaks on a Friday evening.
Option 3: one tool for both
The third way is to run bookings and the till in the same software, on the same database: a reservation becomes an open table, the guest profile follows through to the bill, and the cover history builds itself. This is what Plate is built to do, for €90 per month per restaurant, all in — bookings, an NF525 till (certification in progress), SMS reminders, accounting export. The product is not on sale yet: it opens on certification day, not before. If that approach speaks to you, you can join the waiting list to be told at launch.
Five questions to ask before you sign
- Is the till NF525-certified, and is the certification finished or “in progress”?
- What is my total monthly cost across all tools, for my number of terminals and covers?
- Does the booking reach the till without retyping, and who maintains that link?
- What happens to my data if I cancel one of the two tools?
- What do you charge extra per cover, per SMS or per payment terminal?
Frequently asked questions
- Does a restaurant till in France need NF525 certification?
- Yes. In France, every till system used by a VAT-registered business must meet the conditions of article 286 I-3° bis of the CGI, which in practice means NF525 certification. An uncertified till exposes the restaurant to a tax reassessment.
- How much does restaurant booking software cost?
- Vendors publish monthly subscriptions ranging from tens to hundreds of euros per month depending on features — Zenchef’s management plan is listed from €169/month, for example — and some networks such as TheFork additionally charge a per-cover fee on bookings coming from their network.
Plate is a business built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp — which is how we keep this page current as vendors’ announcements change. The prices quoted are the ones the vendors published at the time of the update.