Hardware: none. You already own the terminals.
Every screen in this product is a web page. The till, the display on the pass, the handheld in an apron, the clock by the staff door — each one opens in a browser and installs to a home screen, where it runs full screen with no address bar. So the hardware decision is one you made years ago, with whatever is in the office drawer.
There is nothing to buy from us, nothing to lease, and nothing that stops working if you leave.
The lineup
Six objects, no invoices
Registering a device asks one question.
Not nine checkboxes — one question: what is this? You are naming an object you can point at, and the answer decides what it may do and which screens it opens on. A host stand and a till need much the same permissions and use them completely differently, which is why the product asks rather than infers.
- Bar or counter till Runs on
Fixed on a counter. Takes orders and payment, and staff clock in on it.
A 10-inch tablet on a counter stand, or any spare laptop.
- Floor handheld Runs on
Carried in an apron. One server, their own tables.
A phone. A cheap Android in the apron, or the server’s own.
- Host stand Runs on
By the door. Seating the book, walk-ins, who is waiting.
The tablet on the host stand — often the same one taking bookings.
- Kitchen & stock Runs on
The pass or the dry store. Prep screen, stock counts, 86ing dishes.
A wipeable tablet, or a monitor on a mini-PC mounted above the pass.
- Clock terminal Runs on
Wall-mounted by the staff door. Clocking in and out, and nothing else.
The oldest tablet you own. It shows one screen and nothing else.
- Back office Runs on
The manager’s tablet in the office. Reports and venue settings.
The laptop you already do the books on.
What a device needs
Check it against what you own
Five things, and none of them is a model number.
We publish the requirement rather than a list of approved tablets, because a list is obsolete the month after it is written and tells you nothing about the device already sitting in your office. If what you own does these five things, it works.
- A browser from the last few years
- Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, kept updated. There is nothing to download from an app store, because there is no app to download — the terminal is a web page that installs itself to the home screen.
- Wifi it can rely on
- The till keeps taking orders through a dropout — see “What you take on” below for exactly how far that goes — but the guest ordering on their own phone, the live kitchen display and card authorisation all need the network. Treat the offline queue as a safety net for a bad ten minutes, not as a way to run a venue on bad wifi.
- Enough screen for the job
- A pass display wants ten inches or more, because tickets are read at arm’s length across a hot kitchen. A handheld is a phone. The clock terminal shows one screen and will run on anything.
- Safari, if it is an iPhone or iPad
- Apple only allows a web app onto the home screen from Safari — an Apple restriction, not one of ours. Install it there first, then sign in inside the installed app, because on iOS a home screen app keeps its own session.
- Mains power for anything mounted
- A tablet bolted to the pass should be on a cable, not a battery. This is the least interesting sentence on this page and the one most likely to cost you a service.
What you might buy
Neither of them from us
Two objects a browser cannot be.
Everything else on this page is a screen you already own. These two are not screens — one reads a card, the other puts ink on paper — so they are the only things on the list you might actually go and buy. Both are optional, and neither is sold by us.
A card reader
If you want to tap a card at the table, something has to read the card. AtTable drives readers you already have on Stripe, Square, Clover or SumUp — the reader stays yours, on your merchant account, and the money settles where your money already settles. We never hold it.
Plenty of venues never buy one: the guest pays on their own phone from the bill on their screen, or you take the card on whatever you use today and mark the bill paid from the floor.
A receipt printer, if the wifi is unreliable
Any standard 80mm or 58mm thermal printer, driven straight from the browser's own print dialog — no driver from us, no box in the middle. Day to day it is optional, because the kitchen display does this job better.
⚠️ During an outage it stops being optional. The board needs the network and goes quiet; the printed ticket is then the only way a round rung on the till reaches the pass. If your connection is the weak part of the building, this is the cheapest insurance on this page.
The arithmetic
What the hardware line comes to
None
There is no terminal to buy, no bundle, and no hardware line on the invoice. There is nothing for us to sell you, so there is nothing for you to be sold.
None
No three-year lease on a screen, and no equipment to send back. Leaving costs you the subscription you stop paying.
A tablet
If the pass has no screen, a mid-range tablet and a stand is the whole outlay — and it is bought from whoever you like, at whatever it costs that week.
Replace it
Buy another on a Saturday, sign in, register it, and revoke the old one. No engineer visit, no RMA, no waiting on a replacement terminal to be shipped.
What you take on
Worth knowing before, not after
Supplying it yourself cuts both ways.
Owning the hardware means owning the hardware. We think that is the right trade for almost every venue — but it is a trade, and a page that only listed the upside would be selling you something.
- You own the devices
- A tablet that will not charge is yours to replace, and we cannot post you one. In exchange, nobody can hold your floor hostage over a terminal you are still leasing.
- You own the wifi
- Most "the system is down" calls in this product are a router. We will help you read what happened, but the access point in the ceiling is not something we can fix from here.
- Consumer tablets are consumer tablets
- They are not sealed, not drop-rated and not built for a wet pass. A £40 case earns its money. A purpose-built terminal genuinely survives more — it just costs twenty times as much and does less.
- The till survives a dropout — not the rest
- Lose the connection and staff keep ringing rounds on the till from a saved menu. Each one prints a kitchen ticket, cash and pay-at-the-end still work, and the rounds send themselves in the order they were rung once you are back, without ringing anything twice. What stops: guests cannot order from their own phones, the kitchen display goes quiet, and card payments need authorisation. The kitchen runs on paper until it returns.