Look at H&L from the office upstairs and it is one of the strongest things in Australian hospitality. Look at it from the bar downstairs and something else is going on: several of the things a guest actually touches have another company's name on them, and the join between those companies belongs to nobody but you.
Upstairs: a back office built for a licensed venue
Credit this properly, because it is the reason H&L is in two thousand plus venues by their own count. Sysnet holds your products and prices centrally and pushes them out to the tills, and Syswan carries that across sites for a group. Till balancing reconciles POS totals against physical cash and EFTPOS every day and makes you correct the tendering errors. Price levels A through E, time switched sales specials, mix and match promotions, split bills by seat or by item or across table accounts, allergy prompts at the register, their own kitchen order display with item timing and expediter mode. Dashboard reports revenue, cost, profit, margin and refunds by revenue group, location, item, hour and operator, on any device.
Their workforce module is genuinely strong too: roster templates, labour forecasting against sales, wage cost targets by cost centre and site, a time attendance kiosk, availability grids, leave calendars and automated award interpretation, with the resulting time data handed to a payroll system such as ADP, Sage or Tanda. We are not going to pretend we run a 400 patron pub's back office better than H&L does. For a venue with gaming, a duty manager and someone in the office three days a week, that depth is the point.
Downstairs: the hundred dollar gift card that lives at two companies
Saturday, half past eight, and someone buys a hundred dollar gift card at the bar for a birthday on Tuesday. H&L's own helpdesk documents gift cards through its Now Book It integration: the card number is entered at the POS, and the redemption is recorded in the Now Book It admin page. There is no H&L gift card module of its own.
So one card, two companies. On Tuesday the guest hands it over and asks how much is left on it. The answer lives in a different company's admin page from the one your bar staff are logged into. When the number does not come up, the person on shift has two support paths and no idea which one owns the problem, and the guest at the bar is watching them find out. That is the seam. Nobody sold it to you and nobody else will fix it at 8.30pm.
Two menus, one price rise
Here is the same seam in the thing you do most often. Put the parma up a dollar. In Sysnet that is one edit and it pushes to every till, which is exactly what you want. Your online ordering menu is not in Sysnet. H&L's own integration page credits digital menu creation, dietary filters and upsells to HungryHungry, and its integration list names me&u, Chewzie, Qlub and Doshii alongside it. That menu is built and priced in the partner's platform, so you log in there and do it again.
Now the Anzac Day hours. Sysnet gets told. The ordering partner gets told. H&L does not do bookings at all, so your booking product, from a third company, gets told. Google gets told. Four logins, four small jobs, and the one you skip is the one that takes an order for a kitchen that is closed. Then a regular changes their mobile number and it ends up right in Sysnet Members, which does hold member spend and visit history well, and wrong in the ordering platform and wrong in the diary.
The quote, and the venue it is written for
H&L does not publish pricing, so you cannot size this up without booking a call, and the quote is built for the kind of venue H&L sells to: larger licensed sites, often more than one. Before opening you are looking at hardware, install and configuration, then an ordering partner's own agreement, then a booking product, then whatever the gift card side costs, all before a schooner is poured.
Ours is on the site in Australian dollars. Allvio Complete is $399 per month ex GST for one location and $299 per month for each extra location, with every app switched on and no per user charge. Build your own starts at $20 per month per app. The trial runs 30 days with no card. Hardware is bought outright at $1,499 ex GST for the single station, $1,869 for the retail station and $2,499 for the restaurant station. That one subscription also carries invoicing, payroll and BAS figures, and that is the last you will hear of the books here.
H&L POS | Allvio | |
|---|---|---|
What you are actually buying | A deep licensed venue till, back office and workforce module, with online ordering and gift cards delivered by named partners | One Australian subscription: till, ordering page, booking diary, campaigns, rostering and timesheets |
Getting it running | A serious Sysnet configuration, then a separate onboarding with an ordering partner, then a booking product on top | One setup, one login, and the ordering page and diary are already inside it |
Changing a price or a menu item | One edit in Sysnet pushes to the tills, then the same edit again in the partner platform that holds your online menu | One edit reaches the tills and the ordering page together |
Changing your trading hours | Sysnet, then the ordering partner, then the separate booking product, since bookings are not part of H&L | Changed once, including what guests can book |
Keeping a customer's details right | Sysnet Members holds member spend and visit history well, but the ordering partner and the diary each keep their own copy of the same person | One record with visits, spend, allergies and occasions, read by the bar, the diary and marketing |
What you pay before your first sale | Hardware, install and configuration by quote, plus an ordering partner agreement and a booking subscription | Hardware outright from $1,499 ex GST, then one subscription, after 30 days free without a card |
Working out what it will cost you | Not published, and the partner costs sit outside the quote, so nothing can be costed from the website | Published in Australian dollars: $399 per month ex GST for one location |
When it breaks mid service | H&L for the till, the ordering partner for the online orders, and another party again for gift cards | One company answers for the till, the ordering page and the gift card balance |
Best fit | Hotels, clubs and multi site pub groups with gaming, a duty manager and someone in the office who lives in the numbers | An owner-operated venue that wants ordering, bookings and rosters working from day one on one bill |
The couple at the end of the bar
They have been in most Thursdays for six years. Tonight is their anniversary, which is why they booked, in the booking product, where the note about the anniversary sits. They ordered a bottle through the QR platform at the table, which is where their name and card sit. Their spend history, all six years of it, is in Sysnet Members. Three systems each hold a third of these two people, so the young bloke who serves them treats them exactly like the two strangers who walked in behind them. He is not doing anything wrong. Nothing he is looking at tells him who they are.
When H&L is the right call
A hotel with gaming, twenty taps, a function room and a group finance person will get more out of H&L's back office and workforce module than out of us, and should probably buy it. The calculation changes for a single site owner who does the roster on Sunday night and answers the phone themselves. There the cost is not the licence. It is how many companies you hold in your head at once, and how many places one dollar on the parma has to be typed.
This comparison reflects each product's general positioning as published by each vendor in August 2026. Features and pricing change: always check directly with each vendor before deciding.