OrderMate POS — bank compatibility

OrderMate is a point-of-sale system for bars and pubs, cafes, hospitality and restaurants. Melbourne-built, and one of the few Aussie POS companies big enough to get bought by a listed one.

It is certified on all three middleware layers that matter here — Linkly, mx51 and Tyro. Eighteen of the 1,127 systems on this site manage that, which leaves your choice of bank about as open as it gets.

Certified to do pay at table, split bills, tipping, bar tabs and pre-authorisation, plus 2 other capabilities. Tyro rates it a Premium partner — their top tier.

The Linkly integration runs on premise. The mx51 integration uses SPI Java or Spice and was last certified in June 2022, on Windows. mx51 holds 2 separate certified builds for it, so what works depends which one you are on.

OrderMate was founded in Melbourne in 2001 by Mark Calabro and Shannon Hautot, and had somewhere north of 2,400 venues on it by the time MSL Solutions (ASX:MSL) bought the business in 2021 for $7.5 million — $5.5m cash and $2m in MSL shares. Its strength was always the complicated end of hospitality: fine dining, multi-revenue-centre venues, the sites where the order flow matters more than the price of the terminal.

That is no longer where the ownership stops, and this is the bit most OrderMate venues have missed. Pemba Capital took MSL Solutions private in a $120 million deal and delisted it from the ASX, then in February 2023 folded it into Oolio — the group Pemba had built around Bepoz. So OrderMate was bought by a listed company that is no longer listed, and now sits inside a private equity-owned stable alongside Bepoz, Idealpos, SwiftPOS and Deliverit, totalling more than 22,000 venues.

Practical upshot: if you are getting competing quotes from OrderMate, Idealpos and SwiftPOS, you are negotiating with one owner three times. Worth knowing before you treat them as independent bids.