What Is a Restaurant POS System?
What is a restaurant POS system?
A restaurant POS (point of sale) system is the software that takes orders and payments. In most restaurants it runs a lot of what happens around them too.
Old tills just recorded sales. A current restaurant POS also manages the menu, sends orders to the kitchen, tracks stock and reports on sales. It pulls in orders from your online channels, and if you have more than one site, it can link them all to one back office.
What does a restaurant POS system do?
Order management
Staff put orders in at a till, kiosk or handheld. The POS sends each item to the right station - hot food to the grill, drinks to the bar - either on a kitchen display system or as a printed ticket.
That gets rid of paper order pads. It also cuts the mistakes that come from bad handwriting or an order shouted across a busy kitchen that nobody heard.
Payment processing
The POS connects to your card terminals and takes credit, debit and contactless. It splits bills, applies discounts, does refunds and handles cash as well.
Menu management
The menu lives in one place. Change a price, add an item or mark something as sold out from the back-office screen and it updates on every terminal straight away, online ordering channels included.
Reporting and analytics
Every transaction is recorded, so you can see what sells, at what time and on which days. Labour reports show staff costs as a percentage of revenue. Stock reports compare what you actually used against what you should have used, which is where you find the waste.
Online ordering integration
With an integrated system, orders from your website, app or self-service kiosks go straight into the POS and show up on the same kitchen screen as orders taken at the counter. Nobody has to retype online orders.
What hardware does a restaurant POS use?
| Hardware | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Touchscreen terminal | Main order entry at the counter |
| Receipt printer | Customer and kitchen receipts |
| Kitchen display screen | Shows orders to the kitchen without paper |
| Card terminal | Takes card payments |
| Cash drawer | Locked till for cash |
| Handheld device | Ordering at the table in sit-down restaurants |
| Self-service kiosk | Customers order themselves, no staff needed |
You won't need all of it. A takeaway counter can get by with a terminal, a printer and a card reader. A full-service restaurant will probably add kitchen screens and handhelds.
Flipdish POS hardware has examples of how setups are put together.
Cloud POS vs traditional POS
A traditional POS runs on a server in the building. It keeps working when the internet drops, but it's expensive to maintain, slow to update and bad at sharing data between sites.
A cloud POS runs in a browser or a small app and stores the data remotely. With a cloud system:
- Updates happen automatically, so no engineer visits
- You can log in from any device
- You can manage several sites from one screen
- It usually costs less to get started
Most new restaurant POS installs in the UK and Ireland are cloud-based now. On-premise systems mostly hang on in large enterprises with specific compliance requirements.
How much does a restaurant POS system cost?
| Cost component | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Software subscription | £50–£300/month per site |
| Hardware (terminal + printer + card reader) | £500–£2,000 per terminal |
| Installation and setup | £0–£1,500 |
| Ongoing support | Included or £50–£200/month |
Some providers add transaction fees on top of the subscription. Others bundle in payment processing and charge a flat rate per transaction. Add up software, hardware and payments before you compare anything. The monthly software fee on its own tells you very little.
What to look for when choosing a restaurant POS
Start with your service model. A QSR and a table-service restaurant need different things, so check the system was built for the way you actually take orders.
Then online ordering. Orders from your website, app and kiosks should land in the kitchen without anyone touching them.
It should be cloud-based. Changing the menu remotely and reporting across sites are basic expectations at this point.
Compare the total cost - software, hardware, payment processing and support together.
Ask about support. If the POS goes down at 8pm on a Friday, you need someone to answer the phone. Find out the support hours and response times before you sign anything.
And think about where you'll be in a few years. A system that works for one site should handle ten without you having to rebuild it.
How Flipdish approaches this
Flipdish POS is a cloud POS built for fast-casual restaurants, QSRs and multi-location groups. It connects directly to Flipdish online ordering, kiosks, loyalty and payments, so counter orders and online orders go into one kitchen queue and one reporting dashboard.
If you run several sites, or plan to, you manage menus centrally and get group-level reporting without a separate system at each location.