Point of sale for independent restaurants in Sri Lanka
Register, floor plan, kitchen display, reservations, inventory and staff — the whole till, free while the pilot runs.
We are based in Toronto, so we set you up over video call and screen share. Nobody flies out. We will help you load your menu and build your floor plan on that call.
No card required. No contract. Stop whenever you like.
Everything below is in the product today
Not a roadmap and not a trimmed-down trial. If it is on this list, you can open it on the first day.
Front of house
A register that knows about seats, modifiers, allergy notes and coursing. A floor plan and real table service: move a table, assign a server, hand one server's tables to another at the end of a shift, merge two tables into one bill.
Kitchen
A kitchen display routed by station, so the grill sees grill tickets and nothing else. Bump, recall and re-fire; rush a ticket; message the line.
Ordering
Online ordering for pickup, QR ordering at the table, a self-serve kiosk, and a digital menu board for a screen on the wall.
Front desk
Reservations, and a walk-in waitlist that quotes a wait and pages the guest when the table is ready.
Back of house
Inventory with counts and reorder points — flagged on the register and turned into a suggested order in purchasing. Purchase orders and receiving, recipes with plate costs, waste tracking. Staff roles and permissions, scheduling, a time clock, attendance and labour reporting.
Reporting
Daily reports, including a digest that arrives without you asking for it, and CSV export for whoever does your books. Several locations on one account, with a roll-up across them.
Runs on what you have
A native iPad app — a pilot build we install for you, not on the App Store yet — or any browser on any machine you already own. The kiosk, the menu board and the QR ordering pages are all just web pages.
What Surge does not do yet
We would rather you read this now than find out in month two.
We do not process cards. Anywhere.
Not in Sri Lanka, not in Canada, not anywhere. Surge records the sale; you keep taking payment exactly as you do today, by whatever means you use now. We do not quote a rate because we do not have one, and there is nothing for you to switch or cancel.
Setup is remote. Nobody flies out.
We are in Toronto. Onboarding is a video call with screens shared: we load your menu, draw your floor plan, set your staff up and walk somebody through the register before you run a shift on it. It is the same work, done down a line. If what you want is a person in your dining room, we are not that.
Sri Lankan tax is untested.
Tax rates are configurable and you can set yours. But the tax model was built around Canadian rules and has not been run against Sri Lankan VAT or SSCL by anybody. We are not claiming compliance, and you should check what comes out of it with your accountant before you rely on it.
Your currency and your clock are not settings yet.
The reporting engine handles a five-and-a-half-hour offset correctly — day boundaries, dayparting, shift times and the daily report all follow a business timezone properly. What you cannot do is pick yours. The settings screen offers North American timezones only, the currency setting accepts Canadian and US dollars and quietly rewrites anything else, and the register, receipts, kiosk and menu board print a dollar sign whatever the setting says. Making these real settings is work we have not done.
No LankaPay, no local wallets.
There is no integration with LankaPay or with any local wallet, and none is being built right now. If your customers expect to pay that way, they will keep doing it the way they do today and Surge will not be part of it.
English only.
The whole product is in English — every screen, every button, the receipts and the kitchen tickets. There is no Sinhala and no Tamil interface, and translating it is not on a schedule we can tell you about. Your staff will be reading English at the till.
We are nine and a half to ten and a half hours behind you.
Our day starts as yours ends. We have not set a staffed support window, so we are not going to print one here and miss it. What we will say is that this is a real cost of piloting with us, and that during the pilot you are talking to the people who wrote the thing rather than to a queue.
We do not sell or ship hardware.
No terminals, no printers, no iPads, no cash drawers. You run it on what you already own. If your printer or your drawer does not work with it, that is a thing we would want to hear about, but it is not a thing we can post to you.
The iPad app does not print or take payment.
The native iPad build runs the floor and the register, but it does not send receipts or kitchen chits to a printer and its payment buttons do nothing yet. For printing, run the browser version. It is also a pilot build we install for you by invitation, not something you can download from the App Store.
There is no price after the pilot, and no discount promised.
We have not decided what Surge costs. We are not going to invent a number here, and we are not promising early joiners a rate, a discount or grandfathered access, because a promise we are not sure we can keep is worth less than saying we do not know. What we will do is tell you before anything changes, and you can walk away.
It is free, and you tell us the truth
That is the whole arrangement. You get the whole till for nothing while the pilot runs. In exchange we want you to use it through real service — a proper Friday, not a test — and then tell us plainly what was slow, what was missing and what made the shift harder.
The second half is the part we cannot buy anywhere else, and it is why there is no card, no contract and no notice period. If it is not working for you, saying so is the most useful thing you can do, and then you can stop.
Small, independent, and busy enough to break it
We are after a handful of places that will lean on the whole thing rather than poke at it. If you are on this list, the pilot is worth your hour.
If you are not, say so anyway — we would rather know who is reading this and finding it a poor fit than not.
The honest answers
Can I take card payments through Surge?
No. Surge does not process cards anywhere in the world yet — not in Sri Lanka and not where we are. You keep taking payment exactly as you do now and Surge records the sale. There is no rate on this page because there is no rate. There is also no LankaPay or local wallet integration.
Do you come and set it up?
No — setup is remote. We are based in Toronto, so we book a video call and share screens: we load your menu, build your floor plan, set your staff up and walk somebody through the register before you run a shift on it. Nobody flies out, and we would rather say so now than have you expect a van.
Does it handle Sri Lankan tax?
Tax rates are configurable, so you can set yours. But the tax model was built around Canadian rules and nobody has tested it against Sri Lankan VAT or SSCL. We are not claiming compliance — check what it produces with your accountant before you rely on it.
Can I set it to rupees and Colombo time?
Not yourself, not today. The reporting engine handles a five-and-a-half-hour offset properly — day boundaries, dayparting, shift times and the daily report all follow a business timezone. But the settings screen only lists North American timezones, the currency setting only accepts Canadian and US dollars, and prices print with a dollar sign throughout. Making those real settings is work we have not done yet.
Is it in Sinhala or Tamil, and when can I reach you?
English only, every screen. And we are nine and a half to ten and a half hours behind you, so our day starts as yours ends. We have not set a staffed support window and we are not going to publish one we might miss. During the pilot you are talking to the people who built it.
What does it cost, during the pilot and after?
During the pilot, nothing — the whole till, free while it runs, no card asked for and no contract. Afterwards we do not know, and we are not going to invent a number or promise you a discount for joining early. We will tell you before anything changes and you can stop whenever you like.
Tell us about your shop
This goes straight to us, not into a queue. We read it, we reply, and if it looks like a fit we will find a time that works across the ten hours between us and set you up on a call.
Before you send it, one more time: we do not process cards, setup is remote, the product is in English, and there is no price after the pilot. If any of those is a deal-breaker, it is a deal-breaker now rather than in month two.