A cloud-based POS keeps your menu, your sales and your reporting on a server somewhere else, reachable from anywhere, rather than on a computer in your back office. Almost every system sold today is one. The distinction still matters, because what "cloud" means for your Saturday night is not what the brochure implies.
What it genuinely gives you
Your numbers from anywhere. Sales while you are not in the building — the most-used benefit in practice, and the one owners notice first.
Updates without a visit. No engineer, no version, no scheduled downtime.
Cheaper to start. No server to buy, no local network to build.
Multiple locations in one view, if you get there.
Backups that are somebody else's job. The old failure — a back-office machine dies and takes a year of sales with it — is genuinely gone.
What it does not mean
Here is the part worth being precise about, because vendors are vague and it decides a service.
Cloud does not mean it works without the internet. Some cloud systems stop entirely when the connection drops. Others keep taking orders and cash locally and sync when it returns. Those are enormously different products sold under the same word.
The question to ask is not "is it cloud-based" but: what exactly happens when my internet goes down at seven on a Friday?
A good answer is specific. Orders continue. Cash continues. Card payments may or may not, depending on the processor and whether the terminal can store and forward. Everything reconciles when the connection returns.
A bad answer is "we have excellent uptime", which is about their servers, not your broadband.
Ours keeps taking orders and cash offline and reconciles afterwards, which was a design decision rather than a feature — a restaurant cannot stop mid-service because a router rebooted.
What to actually verify
Ask them to demonstrate it offline. Not describe it — unplug the router during the demo. Any vendor confident in the answer will do this. The reaction to the request tells you a lot.
Ask what happens to card payments specifically, separately from orders. These fail differently.
Ask how long it can run offline, and what happens if you close out while still disconnected.
The questions that matter more than "cloud"
Since almost everything is cloud now, it is a weak filter. These are stronger:
Effective processing rate, by card type. Over a year, the largest line.
Per terminal or per location?
Data export — everything, easily, free.
Contract length and early termination fee.
Those four do more to separate vendors than any architecture question. What a restaurant POS system costs works through them.
The one real cloud downside
You are renting. If you stop paying, you stop having a POS, and the historical data you can take with you is whatever the export gives you.
That is not an argument against cloud — the alternative had worse failure modes — but it is the reason the export question matters. Check it before you have five years of history in there rather than after.
Where it leaves the phone
Cloud reporting tells you what happened at the till. It has nothing to say about the calls that rang out while your staff were serving, which for most restaurants is a real and completely invisible loss.
That is the gap we built Sonorch around: the register and something that answers the phone in one system, so the calls appear in the same place as the sales. Sonorch POS has the detail; the pricing page is flat by team size rather than per terminal.