Application developed by FIT graduates enables people to easily pay in restaurants using QR code

For many people, paying is the most unpleasant part of eating out in a restaurant: waiting for the waiter to bring the bill, discussing who ordered which meal or wondering whether or not the restaurant accepts cash. In a queue, waiting to pay, Lukáš Kovač wondered if it is possible to streamline and accelerate the entire process. He shared his idea for the application with his colleagues - these included the FIT BUT graduates Jan Dorazil and Roman Kantor, who, together with Lukáš Kovač and Miloslav Mrvík, decided to found a company and create the Qerko application. Today, it is used by 120 businesses all over the Czech Republic and more than 15,000 customers. Moreover, it received over 10 million Czech crowns from the Miton investment group as a support to jump-start the company. 

It is quite simple. There is a small label with a QR code on each table at a restaurant. When the customers are ready to pay, they simply choose what they ate and drank, they can add a tip if they want, and then pay the bill using their mobile phones. They will immediately receive the receipt in their e-mail. "We do not want a visit to the restaurants to become an impersonal experience where customers do not interact with the staff at all. At the same time, however, we wanted to streamline the payment process and make it more pleasant," explains Jan Dorazil, who participates in the technical development of the application.

He thinks that the waiter usually loses interest in the customer the minute he or she is served. "This is understandable because the waiter may have ten other tables that have not even ordered yet. However, people who already finished their meal and need to leave have to wait for someone to notice them and bring them their bill. It turned out that the long waiting for payment makes the customer's overall impression worse and he/she then gives up to forty per cent lower tip," Dorazil adds.

Qerko uses modern technologies to provide an elegant solution to this problem. In addition to the application itself, it has recently added integration with Apple Pay. Therefore, customers do not have to enter data from their payment card into several different applications. They simply choose Apple Pay as the payment method in Qerko. Since January when this feature was added, it has been regularly used by almost a third of all users.

Another popular method of payment for food in the Czech Republic - meal vouchers - should be added to the application soon. "People have been frequently requesting the option to pay using meal vouchers. We are negotiating with providers of meal vouchers and it is one of the functionalities we will start offering very soon," confirms Roman Kantor, another co-founder of the company.

The application allows you to easily and quickly pay in restaurants via telephone| Author: archive of Qerko 

Dorazil and Kantor agree that there are many more ideas and functionalities that could be added. For the time being, however, they have been trying to bring the payments using the QR code to perfection. "We have also been thinking about other possible scenarios where the application could be used. It overlaps with other business areas. However, for now, we focus solely on restaurants. We have set priorities and gradually move forward. Besides adding Apple Pay and meal vouchers as new payment methods, we have now also worked on a loyalty scheme. The restaurants themselves wanted to offer something extra to their regular customers," says Roman Kantor. Therefore, Qerko's users will not only speed up their payments, but they can receive discounts or rewards for repeated visits to certain restaurants.

Although more than a hundred restaurants already use the application in the Czech Republic, the co-founders of Qerko have more ambitious plans. Their goal is to involve 800 restaurants by the end of this year. The cash-registering systems represent the only technical obstacle. "We need to find out who ordered what meal. This information is only available in the cash registers. That is why we first had to introduce our application to the manufacturers of cash register systems and negotiate partnerships with them to get them to enable integration of the interface. We have already managed to reach agreement with some large cash register systems providers, but unfortunately, some companies are still unable to use the application. Even if they want to. It is because their cash register system does not allow connection to the application yet," Dorazil notes.

In due time, they are planning to expand beyond the borders of the Czech Republic. "We are currently considering expansion to Slovakia because some cash register systems we already know are used there as well, so our work would be easier. At the same time, we could experiment with payments in Euro; then we would see to which other countries we could expand," says Dorazil.

Dorazil and Kantor agree that despite the rapid advances of technology, the knowledge they obtained at FIT BUT is still very valuable to them. "At the time when we studied, development of applications for iOS or Android was not covered in any course. At the same time, however, we learned so many programming languages that we are now able to easily learn to program in a different language. In fact, on several occasions, we have been dealing with a problem and remembered that we had discussed it in school. That helped us to find a solution. This was great and it proved that our study was a time well spent," Kantor concludes with a smile.