When Sandhill Road Group finally opened the Waterside Hotel in November 2025, it marked the end of a journey that had taken nearly a decade. It began as a modest renovation of one of Melbourne’s oldest pubs, a heritage-listed wharfie’s local dating back to the 1850s, and has now became something far more ambitious after COVID forced the group to change plans and start again.
The result is a seven-level venue on the corner of Flinders and King Streets in the CBD, offering everything from a ground-floor public bar and beer garden serving classic Australian pub meals, to Past/Port, a three-level Southeast Asian restaurant. Multiple bars, a rooftop, three private event spaces, backed by the technology that is built to match the scale.
When you’re opening a venue, there are so many things you can potentially look at to change or assess. Sticking with someone who has always been so reliable for us just made our life easy.
That partner was Bepoz and Oolio, the same combination Sandhill Road had trusted across previous venues. With 22 fixed Bepoz POS terminals deployed across the floors, with 14 Oolio Pay units including mPOS in the restaurant and cocktail lounge for tableside ordering and payments, and 6 QSR kitchen display screens managing a high-volume ground floor kitchen, processing 35,000–40,000 transactions per month, the system needed to do more than just transactions. It needed to run an enterprise.
VISIBILITY ACROSS EVERY FLOOR, EVERY HOUR
For a venue operating across multiple levels with different service styles, menus and revenue streams running simultaneously, real-time visibility isn’t an option, it’s how you manage the business.
Reports are reviewed every morning before the venue opens. His management team goes further, monitoring hourly reports to ensure
everything is running smoothly and changes can be made on the go. With 35,000 to 40,000 transactions processed every month across the venue, that kind of real-time intelligence directly affects staffing decisions, cost control and customer experience in the moment, not the next day.
The system provides us with hourly reporting from a revenue perspective, so we can actually monitor what’s going on across the different floors. As you can see the revenue it is generating, you’re able to adjust your labour at the time as well, send more people to an area to help out if people are getting under the pump.
INTEGRATION THAT REMOVES THE WEAK POINTS
One of the clearest wins Rogers points to is the reduction in errors that comes from having POS and payments fully integrated. Unintegrated systems meant more opportunities for keying mistakes, both at the point of sale and in end-of-day reporting.
The same logic applies to the kitchen. The move to QSR kitchen display screens across the ground floor has removed both cost and complexity from an area of the venue that previously relied on printers and paper dockets across multiple stations.
The reduction in the number of printers is a benefit, it’s another piece of equipment that can break down, it’s costly, and printer rolls are something that is another cost to the business. Savings and complexity reduction are the two things the kitchen management system has provided.
SUPPORT THAT SHOWS UP
For Rogers, one factor stood above the rest when it came to choosing Bepoz and Oolio for a venue of this scale and complexity: support.
Being a large venue, there are many things that happen that we just need instant support and we’ve been able to receive that at any time. The Oolio team will come in here, even late night and help out the venue staff when they’re needed.
That support during the opening phase, deploying and configuring systems across five floors of a brand-new venue, was, in his words, “a huge help and one of the reasons we did go with Bepoz.”
For an industry where venues are getting bigger, more complex and more tech-dependent, that might be the most important endorsement of all.
In an industry where the margin for error is razor thin and the pace never lets up, having a technology partner who genuinely understands hospitality isn’t a nice to have, it’s everything. Oolio and Bepoz don’t just provide the system and walk away. They’re on the floor, on the phone, and in the venue when it counts. Australian hospitality is one of the toughest, most rewarding industries in the world. It deserves technology built specifically for it, by people who love it as much as operators do. That’s the Oolio commitment, and venues like the Waterside are proof of what’s possible when a true partnership is in place.