Cover App: An Easy Payment Solution for Restaurant Meals

The app Cover is revolutionizing the way customers pay for restaurant meals. “What Cover is focused on — removing payments from the table altogether — I really do think that is fundamentally transformational,” according to Denee Carrington, a mobile commerce senior analyst at Forrester Research. “The part of your dining experience that you want to care about or want to remember is not how you paid. The more that can disappear, the better.”

Paying for meals at restaurants can be vexing. The process of getting the server’s attention for the check, waiting for the check, figuring out the appropriate tip and splitting the bill in multiple ways depending on the party size, can be time-consuming and leaves room for errors. Cover allows diners to notify the server at the beginning of the meal that they’ll be paying with the app, and as soon as they’ve finished eating, they are free to leave. Cover handles the bill accordingly with a pre-determined tip percentage the app user has applied. The app also automatically splits the bill amongst all the diners. 

Cover is mutually beneficial for restaurant owners; the fees are lower than those of credit cards. Cover also offers following-day deposits in contrast to three to five business days for the average credit card. Circumventing the check process entirely turns tables faster as well.

Several casual restaurants in New York are already using Cover, including Parm, Empellon Cocina and Charlie Bird, to name a few. You can view the full restaurant list here.