A restaurant POS is the system that takes an order, sends it to the kitchen, tracks what is owed on each table, and takes the payment. Point of sale. The name is about the till, but the till is the smallest part of what it does.
If you are buying one for the first time, here is what it actually consists of and which parts matter.
The five things it does
Takes the order. A server enters what was ordered, against a menu with modifiers — no onions, medium rare, sub fries. This is where most of the day's typing happens, so how fast it is matters more than any feature on a brochure.
Sends it to the kitchen. Either a printed ticket or a screen. The order has to arrive in the right place — the grill items to the grill, the cold items to the pass — and in the right order.
Tracks the check. What each table owes, running, until someone asks for the bill. This sounds trivial and is where a lot of systems get awkward: moving a table, splitting a check six ways, adding a round after the bill was printed.
Takes the payment. Card, cash, split between several cards, tips, refunds.
Records what happened. Sales by item, by hour, by server. This is the part most operators use least and should use most, because it answers what sold, what did not, and when you were actually busy.
What "POS" now includes that it did not
The category expanded. A modern system usually also carries:
- Online ordering, either its own or an integration with a delivery platform
- A customer record — who ordered what, how often
- Staff clock-in and sometimes scheduling
- Inventory, at least at the level of counting down stock
- Reservations or a waitlist, depending on the vendor
Which means "do I need a POS" is no longer the question. The question is which of those adjacent things you want in the same system versus bought separately.
The parts of the price
Four separate lines, and vendors present them differently enough that comparing is genuinely hard.
Software, per month. Sometimes per terminal, which is the one that surprises people — a second till can double the software cost.
Hardware. Terminals, kitchen printers or screens, card readers, cash drawers. Bought, leased or bundled.
Payment processing. A percentage of every transaction plus a per-transaction fee. This is usually the largest number over a year, and it is the one most often left out of the comparison. A fraction of a percent on card volume is real money for a restaurant.
Setup and training.
When you compare vendors, get all four at your real volume. A cheap monthly fee attached to a high processing rate is not cheap.
What to check before choosing
How many terminals does the price cover? Per-terminal pricing changes the answer entirely for anything but the smallest room.
Does it work when the internet drops? Ask specifically what happens mid-service. A system that cannot take an order offline will, eventually, stop your service on the night your connection fails. Ours keeps taking orders and cash offline and reconciles after, which is a design decision rather than a feature.
How do split checks behave? Have someone demonstrate splitting a six-person table by item, not by an even division. It is the single most common awkward moment on a POS and the quality varies enormously.
Can you get your data out? Sales history, customer records. If the answer is vague, assume no.
What happens to a ticket that was sent and then changed? Every restaurant has this moment. Watch it handled.
Where the phone fits
Worth mentioning because it is the gap most POS comparisons ignore: the register handles everyone who is standing in front of you. It does nothing for the people ringing while everyone is busy.
For a restaurant, those calls are mostly reservations, and a reservation that rang out during service is a table you did not sell. Sonorch puts both halves in one system — the register and something that answers the phone and books into the same floor plan — but the point stands whatever you buy. A POS decision that does not consider the phone leaves the busiest hour of your day half-covered.
The honest first question
Before comparing vendors, work out what is actually broken.
If orders reach the kitchen wrong, that is an ordering and routing problem. If you never know what sold, that is reporting. If closing takes an hour, that is the end-of-day process. If you are losing money on delivery, that is commissions, and a POS will not fix it.
Naming the problem first turns a feature comparison into a short list. Sonorch POS is ours, and the pricing is on the pricing page — but the exercise above is worth doing before you look at anyone's.