Teya Alternative: The Best Teya Alternatives for Restaurant Payments
What Teya does
Teya is a UK payments company for small businesses. You get card readers, payment processing and a few business tools, including a basic EPOS. For a market stall, a salon or a small shop that's often enough, and the hardware is quick to set up.
Restaurants hit the limits fast. Takeaways, cafés and groups with more than one site hit them even faster.
Why restaurants move away from Teya
A restaurant till has jobs a retail till doesn't. Tables need tracking. Tickets have to reach the kitchen in the right order. Bills get split five ways. Delivery orders land from three different apps at once. Teya wasn't built around any of that.
The usual reasons operators give for leaving:
- No kitchen display, no table management, no course firing. Tickets and floor plans end up living in other tools.
- Reporting that covers sales but gets thin when you want to compare sites or watch labour cost.
- No branded online ordering website or app, so direct orders mean paying a second vendor.
- Few connections to delivery marketplaces and the other tools a restaurant relies on.
- It copes with one site. At two or three, it gets awkward.
If you've grown past taking card payments and now need counter orders, online orders, delivery, loyalty and reporting to sit in one place, you'll probably outgrow Teya quickly.
Flipdish: the restaurant platform to switch to
Flipdish was built for food businesses, so nothing in it is a retail feature with a menu stuck on top. It covers restaurant POS, online ordering, self-service kiosks, restaurant payments, loyalty and marketing and AI tools. It's used by restaurants, takeaways, cafés and multi-location groups in the UK and Ireland.
Here's how the two compare on the things restaurants ask about most.
| Feature | Teya | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic EPOS | Full restaurant POS |
| Online ordering | No | Yes - branded website and app |
| Self-service kiosks | No | Yes |
| Kitchen display system | No | Yes |
| Integrated payments | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-location management | Limited | Built for multi-site operators |
| Loyalty and CRM | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Delivery marketplace integration | No | Yes - Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo |
The practical difference is that every channel feeds the same place. A customer orders at a kiosk, someone else orders on your website, a third phones it in, a fourth is on Deliveroo. All four tickets show up in one kitchen queue. Nobody retypes anything into the till, and the manager sees one set of reports across every site and channel.
Payments
If Teya is currently your card provider and not much else, Flipdish isn't asking you to give up payments to get the rest. Payments are part of the platform. The till and the card terminal talk to each other, so the amount on the screen is the amount the customer is charged. There's no keying a total into a separate machine and hoping nobody mistypes it.
Kitchen and orders
The kitchen display system replaces printed tickets, and order management puts every channel in one list. Kitchen staff work from one screen instead of checking a printer, a tablet for each delivery app, and a phone.
Direct orders and loyalty
Orders from your own website and app don't carry a marketplace commission, which is where a lot of takeaway margin goes. They also give you the customer's details, and loyalty and marketing tools let you contact those customers directly. A marketplace won't give you that list.
Kiosks and phones
Kiosks take orders at the counter without tying up a member of staff. AI phone ordering answers the phone while the kitchen is busy, which is usually when it rings.
More than one site
Menus, reporting and staff settings can be managed centrally across locations. That's the part Teya doesn't handle well, and it gets more important with every site you add.
A busy Friday, both ways
Picture 7pm on a Friday. On Teya, the card reader handles payment fine. Everything around it is manual. Someone watches the Uber Eats tablet, someone else has the Deliveroo one, the website orders come through email or another vendor's dashboard, and the kitchen works off whichever printer is shouting loudest. When a table asks to split the bill, somebody does it by hand on a calculator.
On a restaurant platform, the same night looks different. Every order, whatever its source, is on the kitchen screen in the order it needs cooking. The table's bill is split in the POS. At close, the day's takings from the counter, kiosk, website and marketplaces are in one report, so nobody spends Saturday morning matching four spreadsheets.
None of that is exotic. It's just what a restaurant system does when it was designed around a kitchen and not around a card reader.
The marketplace problem
If you also sell through Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, Teya has no part in that side of the business. Those orders arrive on separate tablets, with separate menus to keep up to date, and the commission comes off the top of every one.
Flipdish connects to those marketplaces, so their orders land in the same queue as everything else, and it also gives you your own ordering website and app. That second part matters more. Each customer you move from a marketplace to your own channel stops costing you commission, and you get their contact details. You don't have to leave the marketplaces. Keep them for finding new customers and nudge your regulars to order direct.
What to check before you switch
Whatever you pick to replace Teya, run it past these questions.
Do the POS and the payments work as one system? If they're separate, they can drift out of sync and you'll spend end-of-day time working out why the totals don't match.
Can you take orders on your own branded website and app? Anything you sell directly keeps more of the margin than the same order through a marketplace.
Is there a kitchen display system that pulls all your order channels together, or will the kitchen still be juggling screens?
If you have, or want, more than one site, can you set menus and see reports across all of them from one login?
Can you get customer data out and use it? If a marketplace owns the relationship, you're renting your own customers.
What happens when something breaks mid-service? Ask how onboarding, training and support work before you sign, because that's the bit you'll remember.
Other providers that started out as card-reader companies, SumUp for example, have the same gap as Teya. Payments came first and restaurant features were added later. Swapping one for another won't fix the problem you're leaving Teya over.
Costs
Teya charges a monthly fee plus a fee on each card payment. The rate depends on your volume.
Flipdish charges a platform fee that covers the POS, online ordering and reporting in one subscription. It's worth asking about payment processing rates as well, especially if your card volume is high.
Don't compare monthly fees alone. Work out what a full year costs you, and include:
- Hardware
- Card processing fees as a percentage of takings
- Any per-site or per-terminal charges
- What you pay for delivery marketplace integrations
- What you pay for marketing tools
Take a restaurant putting £50,000 a month through cards. A difference of 0.1 percentage points in the blended rate is £50 a month, or £600 a year. A difference of 0.5 points is £250 a month, or £3,000 a year. A monthly fee that's £30 lower can easily be wiped out by a slightly worse processing rate, so do that sum before you decide what's cheaper.
Add the tools you currently pay for separately too. You may be paying for a separate online ordering subscription, a loyalty app and a reporting tool. If Flipdish replaces those, count them as savings.
Switching from Teya
Changing POS and payment providers is manageable if you plan it. Here's the order that works.
- Audit what you have. List your hardware, the integrations you use and the data you need to bring across, such as menus and customer records.
- Pick a cutover date on a quiet day. Not a Friday, not a bank holiday weekend.
- Train the team before go-live. Staff should have used the new system before the first real service, not during it.
- Test every channel. Place an order online, through each marketplace you use, at the counter and by phone, and check each one reaches the kitchen and takes payment properly.
- Keep Teya available for a short while. Leave the old setup within reach for the first few days in case something unexpected turns up.
Flipdish provides dedicated onboarding support to help with the switch.
Moving to Flipdish
If you run a restaurant, takeaway, café or small group in the UK or Ireland and Teya has stopped keeping up, Flipdish gives you one system for POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty and AI tools. Kitchen staff get one order queue. Managers get one dashboard. Customers get the same experience whichever way they order.
Get a Flipdish demo and see how it would handle your own menu and your own sites.