A phone order taken by Skai Solutions lands in TouchBistro as a ticket priced against your live menu, alongside the tableside orders your staff already send from the iPad. Setup is 5 days, you keep your number, and none of your existing TouchBistro modules change.
TouchBistro is an iPad point of sale founded in Toronto in 2010 by Alex Barrotti, with offices in Toronto and New York. It is worth knowing that it was built for restaurants first rather than adapted from a retail till, which is why its default screens assume tables, courses, seats and split bills rather than a queue at a counter.
Australia is not a fringe market for it. TouchBistro founder Alex Barrotti called Australia the company's third largest customer base when it extended its Square payments integration here in March 2017. That was nine years ago and the company has not published a country breakdown since, so treat it as a statement about why you see TouchBistro so often in Sydney and Melbourne cafes rather than as a current market share figure. New Zealand venues run it too, usually independents and small groups rather than franchises.
For phone handling the relevant point is the venue type. TouchBistro sites skew full service and cafe rather than drive through, which means the phone carries bookings as often as orders, and frequently both on the same line during the same hour.
This is the part worth being specific about, because TouchBistro already sells more of the guest journey than most point of sale systems. Its own product range covers Reservations, Online Ordering, Loyalty, Gift Cards, Marketing, a Kitchen Display System, Inventory and Labor Management, and it lists third party connections separately on TouchBistro's own integrations list.
So a well set up TouchBistro venue often has a booking channel and an ordering channel already working. What it does not have is anything that answers a ringing handset. The reservations module takes bookings that arrive online. The online ordering module takes orders that arrive online. Both are excellent and both are silent when the phone rings at 6.40pm and every staff member is carrying plates.
That gap is narrow and specific, and it is the only gap Skai Solutions is trying to fill here. If your phone genuinely never rings because your guests all book and order online, you do not need us and we would rather say so.
The iPad is not asked to do anything new. Your staff keep taking tableside orders exactly as they do now, and the phone order simply appears in the same queue with a different source on it, so at the end of service you can see how much of the night came off the phone.
It does not replace TouchBistro, or your reservations module, or your online ordering. It does not restructure your menu, change your pricing or touch your card processing. It does not read your guest data for any purpose other than completing the call in front of it.
Two honest limits worth stating before you buy. If a caller asks something your menu does not answer, the agent transfers the call rather than guessing, so you still need somebody reachable. And if your venue is fine dining with a long, changing tasting menu and callers who want a conversation about it, a phone agent is the wrong tool. Buy a person.
A$299 a month for 500 minutes, or A$599 for 1,500, plus a one off A$499 setup that covers the TouchBistro 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, do not buy it. We would rather you found that out now. Our page on hospitality award rates gives you the other side of the sum: what the staff minutes currently going to the handset cost at 2026 award rates, which for a Level 2 attendant on a Sunday is A$40.62 an hour.
Setup is 5 days from sign up to live calls. The menu build is taken from your TouchBistro item list rather than retyped, which matters more here than on a simpler till because TouchBistro venues tend to carry deep modifier trees. Voice tuning covers your suburb, your street and the pronunciation of your own dishes, because a speech model trained on North American English mishears Australian and New Zealand names, and that is where phone orders actually break. Then a ticket test into a test till, then you divert the line.
You keep your number, and the divert can be switched on and off, so you can run it during service only, after hours only, or all the time. See every POS Skai Solutions connects to, or Skai Solutions for New Zealand venues.
Fifteen minutes, your TouchBistro menu, your hardest order. Bring the one your staff get wrong.
Book a Free DemoThis is the question that decides whether a phone agent is safe in your venue, and TouchBistro answers it plainly in its own support material, read on 12 September 2026: if you temporarily lose internet connectivity, your TouchBistro devices will still be able to communicate with each other so you can continue taking orders and payments, but some features, such as access to your reports, will be unavailable until the connection is restored.
Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways for a phone agent. The iPads talk to each other over the local network, so in-venue service carries on through an outage. A phone order, however, arrives from outside the building. When the line is down, the floor keeps working and the phone channel is precisely the thing that cannot reach the till. So the correct expectation to set with your staff is the opposite of the usual one: during an outage the POS is fine and the phone is not, and somebody needs to be writing orders on a docket book until the connection returns.
That is worth planning for rather than discovering at 7pm on a Friday. It is also the reason a venue on a single unreliable connection should sort the connection out before adding any cloud channel on top of it.
TouchBistro's own marketing features nine integration partners by logo: DoorDash, 7shifts, Chase, Davo, Deliverect, Moneris, QuickBooks, Shogo and UrbanPiper. Three of those are North American by design. Chase is a United States bank, Moneris is a Canadian payment processor, and Davo handles United States sales tax. None of them is a thing an Australian or New Zealand venue can use.
The ones that do travel are the aggregation layers: Deliverect and UrbanPiper both operate in this part of the world and are how third-party delivery orders are usually funnelled into a POS here. QuickBooks and 7shifts also have local presence. The practical rule is the one this site keeps arriving at from different directions: look for your specific partner by name in the current directory rather than trusting a logo wall assembled for another market, and ask the question before you sign, not after.
Two other published facts are worth having in front of you. TouchBistro states that its reporting layer carries more than 50 cloud-based reports, and that Apple iPads are the core of the system, used as both handheld terminals and countertop stations, with cash drawers, printers and payment terminals added around them. That iPad dependency is the single biggest difference between TouchBistro and the Windows-based systems more common in Australian pubs and clubs.
The answering layer is a separate decision from the POS, and it is worth making it separately. Start with what an AI receptionist actually does on a venue phone.
Vendors almost never publish an exclusion list, so this one is worth quoting. TouchBistro's own material says it is a good fit for single and multi-location full-service restaurants, quick-service restaurants, cafes, bars, breweries and wineries, and that it is not a good fit for independent food trucks, catering companies or retail businesses.
If you are running catering alongside a dining room, that is a straight answer to a question you would otherwise spend two demos discovering, and it is the kind of thing to raise early. It also tells you where the product's attention is, which is table service, and why the reservation and floor plan side of it is stronger than its stock control.
On price, TouchBistro publishes POS software from $69 a month and an Essentials Bundle including hardware and payments from $99 a month with no upfront hardware cost, read 12 September 2026. Those figures are published on its United States site in United States dollars and no Australian or New Zealand price list is published, so treat them as the shape of the pricing rather than a quote. Ask for a local number in writing.
Yes. Orders taken on the phone are written into TouchBistro as tickets and appear alongside the tableside orders your staff send from the iPad, including on a Kitchen Display System if you run one. Setup is 5 days and the menu is built from your existing TouchBistro item list.
Only if your phone still rings. TouchBistro Reservations takes bookings that arrive online and TouchBistro Online Ordering takes orders that arrive online. Neither answers a handset. If your callers have all moved online, you do not need a phone agent.
Yes, and for a full service TouchBistro venue bookings are usually the bigger half of the phone. The booking is completed during the call rather than left as a message for somebody to type in later, which is the difference between a booking and a callback.
No. Skai Solutions sits on the phone line, before the point of sale. Your iPads, printers, card readers and Kitchen Display System are untouched, and your staff keep working exactly as they do now.
TouchBistro's founder described Australia as the company's third largest customer base in March 2017, when it extended its Square payments integration here. The company has not published a country breakdown since, so read that as why the system is common in Australian cafes rather than as a current market share.