Skai Solutions connects to H&L POS, which states it runs in more than 2,400 Australian venues, so a phone order taken by the agent arrives as a ticket in H&L the same way a counter order does, with no re-keying, no second screen and no new hardware. You keep your existing number and your existing POS exactly as they are.
Yes. All of them are the same Australian system, and it is worth saying plainly because the ampersand in the name is awkward to type. Venues, staff and suppliers write it as H&L POS, H and L POS, HL POS and HNL POS, and all four spellings refer to one product. Everything on this page applies whichever way you write it, and Skai Solutions connects to the same system in each case.
H&L is an Australian hospitality specialist that says it runs in more than 2,400 venues here. It is strongest in pubs, clubs and bistros - the venues where the phone rings about bookings, functions and meals all at once.
Pub and club phone traffic is different from takeaway. The valuable calls are function enquiries, large bookings and 'are you doing meals tonight' - long, high-value, and usually missed during service. Skai Solutions answers them and routes what needs a person.
It matters more than most integration pages admit, because an integration is a multi year commitment to somebody else's roadmap. H&L Australia has been owned since 15 October 2019 by Valsoft Corporation, a Montreal based acquirer of vertical market software, which announced the acquisition on H&L's own site. Three details from that announcement are worth a venue's attention.
Put that beside the product question above and the two answers together tell you what you are integrating with. A long-held portfolio product with a preserved brand is unusually likely to still support the install you have in three years, and unusually unlikely to be the one that gets the newest interface first. Neither of those is a criticism. They are the trade you are making, and knowing which trade it is beats being surprised by it.
We are not an H&L reseller and we have no commercial relationship with Valsoft. This is on the page because the question comes up on nearly every call with a pub or club, and because the honest answer to "will this still work next year" depends on who owns the thing we are talking to.
Ask before anything else, because "we run H&L" does not describe one system. H&L Australia has sold several products under the same name, and which one is on the counter decides what an integration can read.
Hospitality Magazine reported in April 2017, when H&L Australia acquired the South Australian point of sale brand Bluefrog POS, that H&L's core products were Zen Global, BooKBooK, Sysnet and H&L Workforce Management, and that the acquisition was aimed at the small to medium restaurant, cafe and bar market. H&L said in the same report that it had been in the hospitality industry for more than 30 years. That is a Tier B trade press source read on 27 September 2026, and the product names are the useful part rather than the deal: a venue on a long-standing Sysnet install and a venue on the newer cloud product are two different integrations wearing one brand name.
What that means on a phone order, in practice. An older on-premise install usually keeps its menu, modifiers and stock state on a machine in the venue, so an order has to reach that machine and the sold-out state has to travel back out of it. A cloud product exposes the same data over an interface that does not depend on a back office box being awake. The question we ask on the first call is therefore not "do you use H&L" but "is your H&L on a server here or online", because the answer changes the setup, not the price. The pricing is the same either way and it is on Skai Solutions pricing.
If the venue turns out to be on a different system entirely, the integrations index lists the ones we already run against, and Square is the closest cloud comparison for how the sync behaves.
A$299 a month for 500 minutes, or A$599 for 1,500, plus a one-off A$499 setup that covers the H&L connection and your menu build. In New Zealand that is NZ$325, NZ$649 and NZ$545. Month to month, no lock-in, 30 days' notice. Full pricing.
Before you buy anything, work out what your unanswered calls are actually worth. If the monthly loss is smaller than the fee, don't buy it - we'd rather you found that out now.
The useful version of this answer is the list of things that do not sync, because that is where integrations disappoint people. Verified against how the connection actually works, not against a feature grid.
| Item | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Menu items and prices | Read from your live H&L menu, so a price you change in H&L is the price the agent quotes on the next call |
| Modifiers and options | Carried on the order the same way a counter operator would ring them in |
| Sold out items | Honoured through H&L's own Available Portions control, which is set per shift and, in H&L's words, is visible on every POS. If an item is 86'd verbally on the pass and the portion count is never touched, the agent has no way to know |
| Course and seat detail | Not attempted. A phone order is a takeaway or pickup ticket, not a table service sequence |
| Split bills and tabs | Not attempted. Those are counter functions in a pub or club and they stay there |
| Loyalty and membership pricing | Not applied by the agent. Club member pricing is resolved in H&L at the till, not on the call |
| Stock levels in Sysnet | Untouched. Skai Solutions writes an order, it does not decrement your back of house inventory independently |
That last row is the one worth reading twice if you run a club. H&L's back of house product does a lot, and the order arriving from a phone call is deliberately a normal order rather than a special case, so your reporting stays clean.
The sold out row deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the row that decides whether an AI phone agent embarrasses you. H&L calls the feature Available Portions: you set how many of an item are available for a shift and, on H&L's own product page read on 10 September 2026, staff can view that count on every POS. That is the hook the agent reads. It also means the discipline is entirely yours. A venue that already runs portion counts gets accurate sold out handling on the phone for free. A venue that calls items off verbally will need to change that habit before the phone will behave, and that is worth knowing before you sign anything rather than after.
One more that helps during setup: H&L ships a Training Mode which its product page describes as simulating the complete POS environment without affecting live trade, till balances or stock levels. That is the sane place to watch a phone order land the first time, rather than testing on a live till on a Friday.
H&L is an Australian hospitality system with a back of house product called Sysnet, an Order Display Monitor for the kitchen, a reporting dashboard, and its own hardware line. The point of sale product itself is branded Exceed POS, which is worth knowing because an H&L quote, an H&L support ticket and an H&L training video will all use that name while everybody in the venue says "the H and L". On its own site, read on 5 September 2026, it states more than 150 integrations, more than 2,400 venues in Australia and more than 30 years in the market, and it now sits under Aspire Software.
The reason that shape matters is the Order Display Monitor. In a pub or club the phone order and the bistro order have to land in the same queue or the kitchen runs two systems on a Friday night. Because the order arrives as an ordinary H&L ticket, it appears on the ODM in sequence with everything else, which is the difference between an integration and a second inbox.
H&L also lists Doshii among its integration partners. If your venue already routes third party apps through Doshii, that is worth knowing before you plan anything, because it changes which side of the connection a new order should arrive from. Every system we connect to is listed on the Skai Solutions integrations page.
This is the question worth asking before any phone project, and the answer is checkable in about two minutes. We counted H&L's published integration directory on 10 September 2026: it names 53 partners across 11 categories, which are Accounting, Bookings, Events, Marketing, Online Ordering, Payments, PMS, Premium Partner, Staff, Suppliers and Others. Note that this is a smaller number than the "more than 150 integrations" figure in H&L's own marketing copy. Both can be true, since a directory of named partners and a count of technical connections are different things, but if you need a specific partner supported, look for it by name in the directory rather than trusting the headline number.
The composition tells you more than the count. Eight of the 53 are property management systems (roommaster, CMS Hospitality, NewBook, Protel, RMS, RoomKey, Hirum and Fidelio), which is the clearest available evidence that H&L's centre of gravity is pubs, hotels and clubs rather than standalone restaurants. Rostering and payroll are well covered, with Deputy, Tanda, Wageloch, ADP and two SAGE payroll products. Accounting runs to Xero, MYOB, NetSuite, QuickBooks accounts payable and four others. Payments include Tyro, Zeller, Linkly, Presto Smart, Worldpay, TSys, PayPal and Eigen.
The part that matters most for a phone agent is the Bookings category, and it is the thing venues get wrong when they plan this. H&L's directory lists booking partners including SevenRooms, ResDiary, Now Book It, Access Collins and iVvy. In other words the reservation layer in an H&L venue is usually a separate partner product, not H&L itself. A phone order is a POS event and lands in H&L. A phone booking is a reservation event and belongs in whichever of those systems your floor staff actually look at. Anyone planning phone automation on H&L should settle that question first, because a booking that lands in the wrong place is worse than no automation at all.
Practical note for when something does go wrong: H&L runs two client portals, an older one and a newer helpdesk, and both were linked from its site on 10 September 2026. Confirm with your account manager which one your venue is on before you need it at 7pm on a Saturday.
H&L does not publish a price. There is no plan table, no monthly figure and no per terminal figure anywhere on its public site, checked on 5 September 2026. Every H&L quote is a scoped install, which is normal for a system built for multi venue pubs, clubs and stadiums, and it means you cannot compare it on a list price the way you can compare a cloud subscription.
The practical effect on budgeting: get the H&L number first, then add phone answering on top as a known fixed cost, rather than assuming the POS quote covers it. It does not. For contrast, a published cloud price sits on our Square integration page, where the plans are listed publicly, and the same quoted install problem is set out on the Impos page.
Three things, and none of them are the integration itself.
If your phone is losing calls at those moments, the arithmetic on what that is worth is on restaurant phone system cost in Australia, and the wider category comparison sits on AI receptionist for restaurants and cafes.
Fifteen minutes, your H&L menu, your hardest order. Bring the one your staff get wrong.
Book a Free DemoYes, and these are usually the calls worth the most. Skai captures the details and passes them to whoever handles functions rather than losing the enquiry to a busy tone.
No. You keep your existing number and divert calls to Skai. The divert can be switched on and off - during service only, after hours only, or all the time.
Five days from sign-up to live calls. The one-off setup fee covers the menu build, the POS connection and voice tuning for your venue.
Skai transfers the call to your team. It takes the routine volume off your floor and escalates anything that genuinely needs a human.
See every POS Skai connects to, or Skai for New Zealand venues.