How to set up a QR menu for your restaurant in 5 minutes

You don't need a designer, a tech team, or a meeting with your CA to launch a QR menu. You need 10 minutes, your phone, and a printer at the corner shop. This is the actual sequence that gets a working menu live, with QR codes on the table, ready to take an order from a real diner.

It is not a sales walkthrough. It is the checklist we use when we onboard a real restaurant, with the rough edges flagged.

What you actually get at the end

A diner walks up to a table, opens their phone camera, points it at the QR sticker, and within two seconds your menu fills their screen: your colours, your photos, your prices, your modifiers. They tap items, they hit "send to kitchen", and a ticket prints (or pops up on a screen) inside the kitchen.

That is the entire experience. Everything else (invoices, analytics, themes, KDS) sits underneath.

Step 1: Decide one thing before you start: dine-in only, or also takeaway?

Your QR has to know which one. Dine-in usually means the table number is encoded into the QR, the diner doesn't pay online, and the bill is settled at the counter. Takeaway means no table, the diner picks "Pickup", and either pays online or at counter.

Most outlets we onboard start with dine-in only for the first week. It is the simpler flow. Add takeaway in week two when you have the rhythm.

If you don't know which to pick, start with dine-in. You can flip a switch and add takeaway later without re-printing anything.

Step 2: Sign up and pick the cheapest plan

Go to QRated, hit "Start free", and create an account with the email your CA already has on file. Use the same email everywhere (UPI, Zoho, FSSAI portal) so future-you doesn't end up with three accounts.

The Free plan is enough for the first 30 items. Don't overspend on day one. You can upgrade once your menu is full and you actually need analytics or KDS.

When asked for the business name, type the name as it appears on the GST certificate, not the marketing name. The marketing name shows up on the menu separately. The legal name shows up on the invoice. Get this right once.

Step 3: Add categories before items

This is the step most people get wrong. They add 30 items with no categories and end up with a confusing scroll-of-doom.

Make 4 to 6 categories first. For a café:

• Coffee
• Tea & Cold drinks
• Bakes
• Breakfast
• All-day plates
• Desserts

For a dosa place:

• Dosas
• Idli & Vada
• Rice plates
• Chutneys & sides

The rule: if a diner can guess the category from the item name, the category is doing its job. "Masala Dosa" obviously belongs in "Dosas". "Filter Coffee" obviously belongs in "Coffee". If you have to think about where to put something, your categories are wrong, not the item.

Step 4: Add 10 items before tweaking anything else

Start with your top 10. Not the full menu. Top 10. The ones that actually sell. The 10 items that make 80 % of your revenue.

Each item needs:

• A clean name (no ALL CAPS, no ~~~, no emojis)
• A short description, one line, what's actually in it
• A price (just the number, no ₹ symbol, the system adds it)
• One photo (we'll come back to this)

Skip everything else for now. Don't add modifiers. Don't worry about variants. Don't tag allergens yet. Get 10 items in and move on. Tweaks come later.

A bad description: "Our delicious masala dosa, lovingly prepared with the finest ingredients." Five words of fluff, zero information.

A good description: "Crisp ghee dosa, potato-onion masala, tomato chutney, sambar." Four ingredients, the diner knows what they're getting.

Step 5: Photos, the part where most menus fail

A QR menu without photos converts at half the rate of one with photos. We measured this on real tenants. The drop-off is not subtle.

You don't need a food photographer. You need:

1. A phone with a decent camera (any phone from the last three years).
2. A window with daylight.
3. A plain plate, ideally white or wooden.
4. Two minutes per dish.

Hold the phone above the plate, fill the frame with the dish, tap to focus, take three shots. Pick the best one. Don't use flash. Don't shoot in the kitchen at night. Don't use stock photos. Diners can tell within a second and it kills trust.

For Indian curries with sauces, shoot from a 30° angle, not directly above. For dosas and flat breads, shoot directly above. For drinks, shoot from the side at table height.

If you have 30 items, this is one focused hour with the camera. Block out a Tuesday morning between breakfast and lunch service.

Step 6: Pick a theme that matches your room

QRated ships with 10 themes. They look very different. Open the theme picker on a phone, not a laptop. Your diners will be on phones. Pick the one that feels like your physical space.

Quick guide:

• Bakery / café with wood and pastel walls → Bakery Warm or Café Minimal
• Fine dining, dim lights, dark wood → Dark Premium
• Street food, dhaba, brightly painted walls → Street Bold or Indian Festive
• Modern coffee shop, concrete & green → Café Minimal

If your room is white walls and Edison bulbs, Café Minimal is almost always the right answer. Don't pick a theme because it looks fancy on the laptop preview. Pick the one that won't fight your interior.

Step 7: Brand colour and logo

This takes thirty seconds. Open Settings → Brand. Pick a primary colour. If you have a brand book, use the hex code from there. If not, pick the colour your sign outside is painted in. That is your brand colour.

Upload your logo as a PNG with transparent background. If you don't have one, type your business name in a clean font, screenshot, and upload. It is fine. Better to ship today with a typed logo than wait three weeks for a designer.

Step 8: Generate your QR codes

Go to QR Studio. Tell it how many tables you have. The system creates one QR per table, each with the table number embedded. The kitchen ticket will say "Table 7", not just "an order from somewhere".

For takeaway, generate one extra QR with no table number. Put that one at the counter or in the window.

Pick a QR style. The default (double-ring with your logo in the middle) reads quickly on phone cameras. Don't pick a stylized QR if your camera can't read it from one foot away. Test before you print. Open your phone camera, point it at the QR on your laptop screen, see if it focuses in under 2 seconds. If it doesn't, pick a simpler QR style.

Step 9: Print

Two choices:

1. Table tents (folded card, stands on the table). Best for sit-down restaurants. ₹15-30 per tent at any local printer. Order 1.5× your table count so you have spares for replacements.
2. Stickers (laminate or matte vinyl, stuck flat on the table). Best for cafés with small tables and no clutter tolerance. ₹8-15 per sticker. Use matte, not glossy. Glossy reflects ceiling lights and the camera struggles.

QRated's print kit gives you a PDF sized to A4 with bleed marks. Send it to a local printer over WhatsApp. Get the proof. Check that the QR scans on the printed paper, not just the digital file. Do this once before you print 50 copies.

If you skip this step you will get 50 prints back with QRs that don't scan. We've seen it happen.

Step 10: Place the QR, watch the first scan

Stick the QR on the table. Sit down at the table. Open your phone camera. Watch the menu open.

Now ask one staff member to do the same. Then a friend. Three test scans before you let real diners in.

Open the Dashboard → Overview tab. You'll see your scan count tick up in real time. The first time a diner you don't know scans your QR, you'll see it move from 0 to 1 and your day will be made.

What to do in the first week

Don't change anything for the first three days. Watch how diners use it.

After day 3, look at:

• Scan-to-order rate. If lots of scans but no orders, the menu is too long, or photos are bad, or the categories are confusing.
• Item drop-offs. Look at items diners view but don't add. The price might be wrong, or the description is unclear.
• Help button taps. If diners are tapping "Call waiter" a lot, something is missing from the menu and they're confused.

Then make one change. Just one. Wait three days. Check again.

Resist the urge to rewrite the whole menu in week one.

What I'd skip on day one

• Modifiers. Sugar level, milk type, spice level: useful, but the diner can put it in the order note for now. Add modifiers in week two.
• Multi-language. Adding Hindi or Kannada is great, but only after the English menu is solid. Adding both at once means two menus to maintain.
• The KDS. If you have one cook and one runner, paper tickets are fine. KDS pays off when you have 3+ cooks and the kitchen is loud enough that a printer slip gets lost.
• Online prepay. Don't ask diners to prepay on day one. They're not used to it. Add UPI prepay for takeaway only, after week two.

Get the basics live. Add complexity only when you feel the pain of not having it.

What changes after the QR menu goes live

The honest answer: less than you think on day one, more than you think by week four.

Day one: a few diners scan, a few order, the first kitchen ticket prints, you get a small kick out of it.

Week four: you have a backlog of "we should add a description for X" notes, you've quietly removed two items that nobody ordered, you've doubled down on the three that everyone does, and you stopped printing a paper menu.

The point of the QR menu is not the QR. It is the data: what people look at, what they skip, what they order. After a month you know your menu the way a chef knows their kitchen, except you have numbers.

That is when QRated starts paying back.