Choosing software for a restaurant in Afghanistan is harder than it should be. Most of what you find online is written for restaurants in America or Europe, priced in dollars, and built around card payments your guests do not use. This guide stays local: it describes what Kabul restaurants actually run today, and gives you a short list of questions that will tell you more than any brochure.
What Kabul restaurants run today
Walk into a well-known restaurant in Shahr-e-Naw and there is a good chance you will find two separate systems. The menu guests scan at the table is often an international QR menu service, billed monthly in US dollars. The till where the cashier prints bills is usually a separate POS, bought and installed on its own, with its own support arrangement. The two do not talk to each other. When a price changes, someone updates it twice, and when it is only updated once, the guest sees one price and the bill says another.
That double setup is normal here, but it is not necessary. It exists because the international menu services never came to Afghanistan properly, and the POS products never learned to show a menu. You are allowed to want one system that does both.
Seven questions to ask any vendor
- Can my team use it in Dari? Not just the guest menu. Ask to see the waiter screen and the kitchen screen in the language your staff actually read. If the demo is English only, the daily reality will be too.
- Is the price in afghani? A dollar subscription changes every time the exchange rate moves. A price in afghani is a price you can plan around. Ask for the yearly total, in afghani, in writing.
- Is it built for cash? Most Afghan restaurants settle in cash. The system should treat cash as the normal case: a clear unpaid list, and a drawer total the cashier can check at close. If the demo keeps asking about card terminals, it was built for a different country.
- Is the menu and the POS one system or two? If the answer involves a second login, it is two systems, whatever the brochure says. One system means a price changed once is changed everywhere, including on the table QR menu.
- Who answers when something breaks on a Friday evening? Ask for the name of the person, not the name of the department. Restaurants do not break during office hours.
- What happens when the internet drops? Connections in Kabul are better than they were, but not perfect. Ask exactly what your team sees during an outage and what happens to orders already sent.
- Who owns my data if I leave? Your menu, your photographs and your sales history should leave with you. Ask how you get them out, and whether that costs money.
The local landscape, honestly
You have real choices, and it is worth knowing the shape of each. TechKhoona and Kohzad are Afghan software companies with restaurant management products. MARG is a large Indian ERP with a dealer in Kabul, strongest in billing and inventory. resturant.af is a Dari and Pashto restaurant system built locally. SambaPOS is a Turkish POS that reaches Afghanistan through resellers; it runs tills well but has no guest menu of its own. FineDine is the international QR menu service many Kabul restaurants already pay for in dollars; it shows menus well but does not run your till. And AfghanDine, which is us: menu, guest ordering, staff screens, POS and reports in one system, priced in afghani.
None of these is wrong for everyone. The right question is which one matches the seven answers above for your restaurant.
What fair pricing looks like
Be careful with any vendor who quotes a price before understanding your restaurant. The honest shape of pricing in this market is a custom quote: the size of your menu, the number of tables, whether you need photography, and how much staff training your team wants all change the work involved. What you can insist on is that the quote is complete, in afghani, and does not grow surprise fees later. If you want to see how we answer the pricing question ourselves, it is on our FAQ page.
Where to go from here
Shortlist two vendors, ask all seven questions of each, and ask to see a live restaurant using the system rather than a demo video. If AfghanDine makes your shortlist, the for restaurants page shows what we build, and getting started explains how onboarding works, step by step. One conversation is usually enough to know whether we fit.
Related guide: Online ordering in Afghanistan: a marketplace or your own system?