Square, Plate IQ Get Corner Table in Restaurant Mobile Payments

Mobile payments and restaurants are increasingly finding common ground, and with good reason. After all, restaurants can readily accommodate both stationary and mobile point-of-sale (POS) operations; whether it’s a cashier stand near the front or servers bringing checks, either way works. Likely seeing opportunity therein, Square and Plate IQ recently got together to step up the restaurant’s bill game with a mobile payments edge.

Plate IQ brings to the table its software for daily sales operations, which allows users to move information from Square for Restaurants to several accounting software operations, including Sage Intaact, Xero, and QuickBooks Online.

This means more ready access to daily summaries, which can themselves provide insight into everyday operations and what might have worked well—or didn’t—on any given day. Plus, there’s no need for manual data entry, which takes a load off of someone’s plate, commonly the restaurant’s general manager.

Plus, daily sales can also be more readily added to proper general ledger accounts, making the already impressive Square for Restaurants—which itself has only been out a couple weeks now—an even more valuable proposition.

Plate IQ co-founder and CEO Bhavuk Kaul noted “As every operator knows, too many processes in the restaurant industry still rely on paper, pencil and manual data entry. In addition to creating room for error, these outdated practices place burden on already busy managers. Plate IQ’s integration with Square for Restaurants gives owners and operators access to last night’s sales accurately accounted for, automatically, by morning.”

While this isn’t going to be the kind of thing that’s felt at the diner level, or even at the server level, it will provide a great deal of incentive to have Square for Restaurants brought in to begin with. That’s the kind of thing that might bring more users into play, and give the diners access to mobile payments where there may not have been any such access before. Of course, given the rise of things like Samsung Pay—we all remember how easy Hannibal Buress had it—Square for Restaurants might have missed at least a couple boats.

Still, an already-attractive prospect has only improved, and that new back-office connection may be appealing to general managers, who likely had to make the call to begin with.