Restaurant Billing is a reasonable search, and the useful answer is not a feature list. It is what the bill has to carry in this trade, what the counter needs when there is a queue, and where the tax treatment is specific.
What is the same in every trade
Whatever you sell, if you are registered and making a taxable supply the document is a tax invoice and the field set does not change: your name, address and GSTIN; a consecutive number unique within the financial year; the date; the customer and their GSTIN where registered; place of supply on inter-state supplies; HSN or SAC against every line; the taxable value per line; and CGST, SGST/UTGST, IGST and cess shown separately rather than as one combined tax figure.
The numbering rule is the one that causes the most trouble in practice, because it cannot be enforced by a person. One consecutive series per year, no reused numbers, and a cancelled invoice keeps its number rather than giving it back.
Rates, thresholds and the scope of e-invoicing have all moved and will move again. Nothing here states a current figure for that reason — check the notification in force for your own turnover.
Restaurant and cafe billing
A restaurant bill is a tax invoice printed in seconds, usually against a table rather than a customer, and often amended before it is settled — an extra round of coffee, a split between four people.
Two things in this trade are commonly got wrong. The first is the service charge: it is your charge, not a tax, it is optional, and it must appear as its own line and never be formatted to look like a government levy. The second is the rate and the input-credit position for restaurant service, which are linked to each other and have changed — so confirm the position for your type of establishment rather than copying an older bill.
Takeaway, dine-in and aggregator orders can differ in treatment and in how they need reporting, so a single undifferentiated day total tends to be where the month's work piles up. Catering an event is a different document again: covers, menu, date and venue, usually a proforma first and the tax invoice after.
What to be clear-eyed about: this is billing and reporting, not a kitchen display system or table management. If your operation depends on orders flowing from a captain's tablet to the kitchen, that is a different category of product and worth saying so.
What you get on the free plan
- Complete GST tax invoices with every legally required field, not a template with a tax box.
- Customers and items stored once, with GSTIN, state, HSN or SAC and rate held against them.
- Tax derived rather than typed — per line, from the item rate and the place of supply.
- One numbering series, issued centrally and consecutive within the financial year.
- Stock that moves as you bill, so a closing figure means something.
- An answer to "who owes me what", aged, without adding anything up.
- PDF invoices to print, email or send on WhatsApp.
- Full export — CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one.
- ₹0, no card, no expiry.
Judging any billing system in half an hour
- Load ten of your own items, including two at different tax rates, rather than using the demo data.
- Raise a bill with both rates on it and check the tax is computed per line, not once on the total.
- Print it on your own printer, on the paper or roll you actually use.
- Raise a second bill and confirm the number advanced by itself.
- Cancel one and check the number was not handed back for reuse.
- Add a customer with a GSTIN and confirm an inter-state supply switches to IGST without being asked.
- Export everything you just entered, and open the file. If you cannot, stop there.
Stock, and why billing is the only place it can be captured
Stock records fail for one reason: they are maintained separately from billing. A count done on Sunday is accurate on Sunday and fiction by Wednesday, because the sales that happened in between went onto bills and not into the stock sheet.
The only arrangement that holds is the one where the bill is the stock movement — an item sold reduces stock because it was billed, not because someone remembered to adjust it. Then a closing figure is derived rather than counted, and a physical count becomes a check on the records instead of being the records.
That is also what makes shrinkage visible. The difference between what the records say and what is on the shelf is information; without records there is no difference to look at, only a number.
Purchases have to come in the same way, which is the half people skip. Stock that goes out through billing and comes in through a note in a diary is still fiction, just slower.
The second person, and what changes
Almost every billing system that fails does so at the point a second person starts billing, and the failure is always the same shape. Two people, two copies, two numbering series, and a month that cannot be reconciled.
What a shared system changes is not convenience but authority. There is one record, one series of numbers issued centrally, and an audit of who raised what. None of that is possible when the record is a file that can be copied.
It changes what you can delegate, too. Billing can be handed to staff while the reports stay yours, because seeing a day's total and editing a day's invoices are different permissions. With a shared file they are the same permission.
If you are a single operator today, this is the thing to plan for rather than the thing to buy for. Moving a year of history is the expensive part, and it gets more expensive each month.
CGST, SGST and IGST — worked out, not chosen
Whether a sale attracts CGST and SGST or IGST is not a preference. It follows from the place of supply: same state as your registration means the tax splits into central and state halves, a different state means one integrated tax at the combined rate.
That sounds simple and goes wrong constantly, because it is a dropdown in most billing software and a dropdown is something a tired person clicks past. In Billixo the split is derived from the state on the customer record against the state on your registration, and it changes the moment either does.
The consequence of getting it wrong is real: an IGST invoice raised as CGST/SGST has to be credited and reissued, and if the return has already gone in, amended.
HSN and SAC codes, and how many digits you need
Every line on a tax invoice needs an HSN code for goods or a SAC for services. How many digits depends on your aggregate turnover in the preceding financial year — smaller businesses report fewer digits than larger ones, and B2B and B2C invoices are treated differently.
Because the requirement is tied to turnover and has been tightened in stages, the practical answer is to store the fullest code you can against each product once, and let the software report at the level required. A six-digit code can always be truncated; a two-digit one cannot be expanded.
Billixo keeps the code on the product record and carries it onto every line automatically, and its AI HSN lookup will suggest one from a plain description when you genuinely do not know.
Bill scanning, in practice
The single largest time cost in most small businesses is not raising invoices — it is entering purchases. A photograph of a supplier bill goes in and a structured draft comes out: supplier, GSTIN, line items, rates, tax split and total.
You check it. That is the workflow, and it is deliberate: an extraction you did not read is a liability, not a saving. But checking a filled form takes fifteen seconds and typing one takes three minutes, and that difference compounds over a month of purchases.
A note for accountants and CAs
If you are the person who has to make sense of a client’s billing at the end of the month, what you need from their software is narrow and specific: a complete outward supply summary, correct place-of-supply treatment, HSN present on every line, and an export you can open without repair.
Billixo produces GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries and exports to CSV, Excel and JSON. Client-side, the invoice fields cannot be skipped, which removes the category of problem where the data was never captured in the first place.
The price, plainly
Free is ₹0 and stays ₹0. The paid plans are bought for a fixed term, paid once, with no auto-renewal and no card kept on file — when a term ends the account drops back to Free until you decide to buy again.
There is no per-invoice charge, no per-user surprise on the free plan, and no feature that is technically included but practically throttled. What the plan says you get is what you get.
Compare the plans on the home page, or just start free now and look at the ceiling from the inside.
Reliability, backups and getting your data out
Cloud billing software is only as good as its worst day. Two things matter more than any feature list: that your data is backed up somewhere you can reach, and that you can export it in a format something else can read.
Exports here are CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one, covering customers, products, invoices and payments. That is the honest test of whether software respects you — not what it promises, but what it lets you take when you leave.
Frequently asked questions
Will it work for my trade specifically?
Test it rather than take anyone's word. Load ten of your own items including two at different tax rates, raise a real bill, print it on your own printer and time yourself. Half an hour on the free plan tells you more than any feature list, including this one.
Does it handle items at different tax rates on one bill?
Yes — the rate is held against the item and the tax is computed per line, then totalled per head. That is the only correct treatment for a mixed basket and it is not optional in retail.
Can I use a barcode scanner?
A USB scanner works the way it does with any web form: it types the code into the field. The value is not the speed so much as that a scanned item cannot be the wrong item at the wrong rate.
Do I need to install anything?
No. It runs in a browser, on a laptop, desktop or phone, so there is nothing to install, nothing to update and nothing tied to one machine. If the office computer dies, you sign in from another one and everything is there.
Are the invoices valid for GST?
Yes. Every invoice carries the fields Rule 46 requires — GSTIN, HSN/SAC on each line, place of supply, the correct CGST/SGST or IGST split, and a consecutive invoice series that restarts each financial year.
See it working on your own bills
The fastest way to judge billing software is to bill with it. Photograph one supplier invoice, raise one sales invoice, and look at the PDF your customer would receive.
Open the software demo → — free account, no card, about a minute to set up.
More details on the home page → — what it does, what it costs, and where the limits are.
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