A plain-English guide to the QR sticker on your counter: what PayNow actually does, when commissions appear, whose account the money lands in, and what to ask before you sign anything.
PayNow is Singapore's bank-to-bank transfer service. When a customer pays by PayNow, money moves directly from their bank account into a payee's bank account — the payee identified by a mobile number, NRIC/FIN or business UEN. No card network sits in the middle; customers pay from the banking app they already use.
The sticker most stalls display is usually SGQR: one printed QR code that bundles several payment schemes together. When someone scans it with a banking app, the app reads the PayNow label and pays the account registered to that QR.
That bank-to-bank detail is why stall owners care: the money lands quickly in your own banking app, and no rented card terminal is needed to receive it. The catch is what the QR does not do. It cannot take an order, show your menu, or tell your kitchen a S$4.50 bowl was just paid for. A sticker receives money — it does not run your stall.
Two very different products share one phrase:
Not every QR payment is a pure bank transfer either: card and e-wallet routes typically charge a merchant discount rate (MDR) — a percentage of each sale. One point specific to hawkers: IMDA's Hawkers Go Digital programme has subsidised e-payment costs for stallholders in past phases; the current subsidy and its caps are on IMDA's own page, which we could not machine-read at publication — check the current terms there before counting on any subsidy.
Three worked examples on one S$4 bowl, sold 100 times a day, 30 days a month:
| Payment route (illustrative) | Cut per S$4 bowl | Over a month (3,000 bowls) |
|---|---|---|
| A. Static PayNow QR paying your own account | S$0.00 | S$0 — but no menu, no order tickets, no sales record |
| B. Ordering platform charging 3% per order | S$0.12 | ~S$360 |
| C. Card terminal at 2% MDR | S$0.08 | ~S$240 |
The lesson is the shape: a percentage looks tiny on one bowl and grows forever with volume; a flat fee behaves the opposite way. Wherever a provider quotes a flat monthly fee, divide it by the commission rate to find the break-even volume — below it the per-order model is cheaper, above it the flat fee wins. Run that break-even on your own bowl count, with the vendor's real numbers, before you pick — not after.
This is the single most useful question to ask about any QR system, and many vendor websites do not state the answer.
If the QR is registered to your mobile number or UEN, the payment is a bank transfer into your bank account. You see it in your own banking app. Nobody sits between you and the money.
If the QR is generated by a platform, the payment may instead be collected into the platform's account first, then paid out to you later on a schedule — sometimes only after a minimum balance accumulates, sometimes after their cut is deducted. That is not necessarily bad — it is often how receipts and reporting become possible — but it changes your cash flow, who holds your money if the platform has a bad month, and how hard a refund is to process.
Ask plainly: "Whose account does the money land in first, when do I get it, and is there a minimum payout?"
Every stall that takes static PayNow meets this moment: 12:30pm rush, customer waving a phone — "I already paid!" — and a queue behind them.
The technical reason it is hard: a payment and an order are two separate events, and a static QR only knows about one. The transfer succeeded — that is the payment state. Nothing in your kitchen knows what they ordered — that is the order state. Matching the two by hand means staff eyeballing amounts and remarks, or trusting a screenshot — and screenshots prove nothing: anyone can show an old transfer.
Two failure modes to plan for:
A QR ordering system ties the payment to one order record, so the menu, the amount and the payment status live together on one screen. At our own stall, payment confirmations are announced automatically from the bank; on the commercial StallPOS plan today, staff confirm with one tap and a voice announcement follows (the fully automatic version is still rolling out commercially — we will not claim it is live before it is). Whichever system you choose, ask to see what the kitchen sees when a payment lands.
Refunds are where account routing matters most. If the customer paid your bank account directly, a refund is a transfer back from you — quick and in your control. If a platform collected the money, the refund depends on their process and payout cycle: who returns the money, how fast, and whether it comes out of your next payout. Ask before you need it.
And the commercial fine print: contract length, deposit, lock-in — and whether the headline price is the whole price. Some low-fee and "free" providers quote hardware, installation, training and payment services separately — ask for the written total before comparing.
StallPOS is QR ordering for individual hawker stalls. Customers scan, order from your photographed menu in English or Chinese (Thai demonstrated), the kitchen gets plain-word tickets, and payment goes by PayNow straight into your stall's own bank account. The QR points at your account, not ours — StallPOS takes no commission and no cut of your sales. You pay one monthly fee, nothing else.
StallPOS is free to start: build your menu first, free, then a 30-day live trial when you activate Go-Live. After the trial it's month-to-month at S$58/month per stall — no automatic charges, ever. Cancel anytime. Payment confirmation today is one tap by staff with a voice announcement; fully automatic bank confirmation already runs at our own 4 MEE noodle stall — daily since Sep 2026 — and is on the commercial roadmap.
Honest exclusions: card payments, delivery-platform sync, printed receipts and loyalty programmes are not in the product today. If those are must-haves for you now, an integrated provider may suit you better — we would rather tell you.
Running a whole coffee shop? Shared table-QR ordering is a concept in the works; pricing is discussed case by case and not published.
A transfer to your own account has no ordering platform in the middle, but fees depend on the payment scheme and acquiring route — card and some e-wallet routes carry an MDR (see the hawker subsidy above). Ask for the written rate sheet.
PayNow is the transfer service. SGQR is one printed QR bundling several payment schemes; the customer's banking app picks the PayNow label out of it.
Singapore's Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG), together with the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) and Market Readiness Assistance (MRA) grant, ceased on 29 September 2026, according to Enterprise Singapore; from 30 September 2026, businesses apply under the EDGE Grant instead. Whether a specific activity such as POS or ordering-software adoption qualifies is not stated on their page — check via the BizSG recommender (bizsg.gov.sg) or an EnterpriseSG advisor. For stallholders, NEA's Hawkers' Productivity Grant (up to 80% of equipment cost, capped at S$7,000, when open) is not open to new applications as of October 2026 — its last application phase ended on 31 March 2026. Check the official NEA, EnterpriseSG and IMDA pages for current eligibility; we promise nothing.
No. Payments go straight to your stall's own bank account; StallPOS charges one monthly fee and takes no commission.
See QR ordering with PayNow going straight to the stall's own bank: live demo and a free start at stallpos.com/stalls, every cost question answered at stallpos.com/pricing — and coffee shops can see the concept at stallpos.com/coffeeshop.