A bar is not a small restaurant, and a POS configured like one will slow your service every night. The order pattern, the tab behaviour and the tipping are all different, and a few specific things matter far more behind a bar than they do in a dining room.
What makes a bar different
Orders are short and constant. A dining room takes a large order every few minutes. A bar takes a two-item order every few seconds during a rush. Taps per drink is the whole game — a system that needs four taps to ring a pint will cost you real service time on a Friday.
Tabs stay open. Often for hours, often attached to a card held on file, often moving as a group moves around the room.
One bartender, many customers. Nobody is coming back to a terminal between each order. Speed at the point of entry is everything.
Tipping happens differently. Cash tips, card tips, and often a pooled arrangement that has to be recorded accurately, because it has legal consequences.
The features that actually matter behind a bar
Fast pours as one tap. Your top twenty drinks should be one tap from the main screen, not three levels deep. Ask in the demo to see a specific drink rung in, and count.
Pre-authorised tabs. Opening a tab against a card without charging it, so the tab can run and be settled later. Check what happens when a customer leaves without closing — walkouts are a real cost and how a system handles the orphaned tab matters.
Transferring a tab. Between bartenders at shift change, and between a bar tab and a table if people move to eat. This is a frequent, real moment and some systems make it genuinely painful.
Splitting and merging. Four people who started separately and now want one bill. Or one bill that needs splitting four ways at the end of a long night.
Quick modifiers. Double, on the rocks, a different mixer. One tap.
The reporting worth having
Two reports and everything else is optional at a bar.
Sales by item, by hour. Tells you what to stock and when to staff. Bars have sharper peaks than restaurants and the shape is worth knowing precisely.
Voids and comps by staff member. Not because you assume the worst, but because this is where inventory quietly leaves a bar, and a number nobody looks at is an invitation.
The tipping question, which is not just a feature
Card tips at a bar carry real obligations. How they are recorded, how they are pooled, and who can legally share in a pool are governed by federal and state rules, and the POS is where the record lives.
Two things are worth getting right at setup rather than later. The system must record tips accurately per shift and per person, because that record is what your payroll and your tax filings rest on. And if you pool, the arrangement itself has to be lawful — which is a question about your rules, not your software.
We wrote up who can lawfully share a pool in tip pooling rules, and the card fee question in the card fee on a tip and who pays it. Both are worth reading before you configure anything, because a POS will faithfully record an arrangement that is not allowed.
Offline behaviour matters more here
A bar cannot stop. If the internet drops at nine on a Saturday, the answer cannot be that orders stop.
Ask specifically: can the system take orders and cash offline, and what happens to open tabs and card pre-authorisations while it is down? The second half of that question is the one vendors are least prepared for, and it is the one that matters behind a bar.
The phone, briefly
Bars take fewer calls than restaurants, but the ones they take are worth more — large groups, private hire, whether you are showing the match. Those calls arrive during service, when nobody can reach a handset.
Sonorch puts the register and something that answers the phone in one system, which is our answer. The general point is just that a bar's phone is low-volume and high-value, which is exactly the pattern where letting it ring out is most expensive.
Sonorch POS runs in restaurant mode with tables, tabs and split checks; the pricing page has what it costs.