What a menu app does well
A diner scans a code, reads the menu on their own phone, and sends an order to the kitchen without waiting for anyone. Prices change without reprinting anything. Photographs of the food do more than a description ever did. Restaurants adopt these products because they work, and none of what follows is an argument that they do not.
What they are is a better way to take an order. The question is what happens to the money afterwards.
The money is cash
Most restaurant revenue in Ethiopia arrives as notes. A menu app has no drawer to open, no change to calculate, and no way to know what is in the drawer at closing time. Somebody counts, somebody remembers, and the difference between what was sold and what is in the box is a conversation rather than a number.
A register exists for exactly that: it knows what the cash sales come to, so counting the drawer produces a variance instead of an argument.
Somebody took the order
An order that arrives from a phone belongs to a table, not to a person. When a sale is voided, a bill discounted, or a payment marked as taken and never reaches the register, the question an owner asks is who. A menu app has no answer, because it was never asked to have one.
This is the loss owners describe when they describe losses. Not theft in the dramatic sense: a fortnight of small corrections that nobody can attribute.
The line will drop
A menu app is a URL. When the connection goes, the menu goes, the ordering goes, and service continues on paper with nothing recording it. A register that runs on a machine in the building keeps taking orders and printing receipts through the outage, because the sale is recorded where it happens.
That is also what the law expects. Directive 1142/2026 permits manual invoices while registration is unavailable and requires every one of them to be registered within 72 hours of the connection returning. A restaurant needs a system that can produce that list. A menu app has no idea an outage occurred.
What the Authority is asking about
The directive regulates sales register systems: what a receipt must carry, what must be logged, and who may supply the software at all. A supplier has to be accredited before a taxpayer may lawfully use its system, and the conditions run to security clearance and a checksum proving the code has not changed.
No QR menu product claims to be an accredited sales register, and none of them should: it is a different category with a different obligation attached. The distinction matters because a restaurant that has digitised its menu has not, by doing so, done anything about the directive.
You can have both
This is not an argument for throwing away something that works. If a menu product is earning its keep, keep it. What a restaurant also needs is a system of record: the thing that takes the money, names who took it, prints the receipt the law asks for, and can still do all three with the internet down.
Easymaz includes a QR menu because a register that could not take an order from a phone would be missing an obvious feature. But the menu is one of five screens, and it is the least of them.
This is a summary written for restaurant owners, not legal advice. Directive 1142/2026 is the authority on itself, and your accountant or the Ministry of Revenues is the authority on how it applies to your business.