EPOS vs POS: What's the Difference?
EPOS vs POS: the short answer
EPOS stands for Electronic Point of Sale. POS stands for Point of Sale. Every restaurant till sold today is electronic, so in practice the two terms mean the same thing.
A Dublin restaurant owner asking about an "EPOS system" and a Chicago one asking about a "POS system" are talking about the same hardware and software. The choices that change how your restaurant runs are cloud vs on-premise, and integrated vs standalone. The name on the box doesn't.
Where the confusion comes from
"Point of sale" is older than computers. It meant the place where a sale happened - the shop counter, the checkout.
When computerised cash registers came in, the industry added "electronic" to tell them apart from mechanical tills. EPOS stuck in the UK and Ireland, especially in hospitality. In the US the "E" got dropped early and "POS system" became the normal term.
UK providers now use both, sometimes for the same product on the same page.
What actually matters
Cloud vs on-premise
A cloud POS keeps the software and your data on remote servers. Updates install themselves. You can change the menu, check sales or tweak settings from a laptop or phone, and every site shows up in one dashboard.
An on-premise EPOS runs on a server in the building. It keeps going when the internet drops, but you install updates yourself, support often means waiting for an engineer to visit, and each site is managed on its own.
Most new restaurant POS installs in the UK and Ireland are cloud. On-premise systems are still around, mostly in large businesses with their own infrastructure requirements.
Integrated vs standalone
An integrated system puts your in-store POS, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty and payments on one platform. Every order lands on the same kitchen screen, wherever it came from.
A standalone EPOS only handles orders taken in person. Online orders come in through something else, so the kitchen works from two queues and your sales numbers sit in two places.
If you take more than a trickle of online orders, this matters far more than whether the vendor says EPOS or POS.
Running more than one site
With two or more locations, you need to manage menus centrally, see reporting for the whole group and push a price or menu change to every site at once.
Single-site EPOS products can't do that. A proper multi-location restaurant POS is built for it from the start.
Practical terminology guide
| Term | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| POS system | Software + hardware for taking orders and payments |
| EPOS system | Same as above (common UK/Irish usage) |
| Till system | Informal term, usually means the hardware |
| Point of sale | Where the transaction happens, or the system running it |
| Cloud POS | POS running on remote servers, managed online |
| EPOS terminal | The physical touchscreen device |
What to look for in an EPOS or POS for your restaurant
Whatever the vendor calls it, check that it:
- Fits how you serve - counter, table service, QSR, delivery, or a mix
- Takes online orders directly instead of through a separate system
- Connects to a kitchen display system
- Lets you manage menus from one place if you run multiple sites
- Gives you clear sales and labour reports
- Runs in the cloud, so you can manage it remotely and updates happen on their own
How Flipdish approaches this
Flipdish calls its product a restaurant POS system. It's cloud-based, built for fast-casual and multi-site operators, and comes with online ordering, kiosks, payments and loyalty on the same platform from day one. One system for the whole operation, whichever acronym you prefer.