Start with your service, not the feature list
The right way to evaluate a restaurant POS is to walk your actual service through it — your busiest ninety minutes, your most awkward menu item, your end-of-day — rather than comparing feature grids. Almost every system does the common case well; systems differ in how badly they handle your specific exceptions.
Write down your five most awkward transactions before any demo. A split check across four cards. Your most complex composite item. A refund of one item from a delivery order. A weighed sale. The thing your current system makes you do on paper. Then make each vendor do all five, live, on their own system.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
- Payment processing. Frequently the largest line item, and often bundled so it cannot be compared. Ask for the effective rate on your mix of card types, not a headline rate.
- Per-terminal and per-module fees. A price per station adds up fast; check whether the kitchen display, kiosk and online ordering are included or separate.
- Hardware. Proprietary hardware you can only buy from the vendor is a lock-in mechanism as much as a product. Ask whether standard equipment works.
- Contract length and early termination. Multi-year terms with termination fees are common and negotiable.
- Onboarding and menu build. Sometimes free, sometimes thousands, occasionally your own unpaid week.
- Integration fees for delivery platforms, accounting or payroll.
Questions that predict regret
- What exactly happens when the internet goes down? Ask specifically whether the kitchen display keeps receiving orders. Why this question separates systems →
- Can I export all of my data, and in what format? Ask to see a real export file. "You can request a report" is not data portability.
- Am I locked to one payment processor? This determines whether you can ever renegotiate your rates.
- Does my menu live in one place? If the delivery platforms, kiosk and online ordering each hold their own copy, every price change is several edits and one of them will be forgotten.
- What does support look like at 8pm on a Saturday? Ask for the actual channel and the actual response time, not the marketing tier name.
- How do updates reach my restaurant? Whether they can land mid-service is a real operational question.
- What happens to my hardware if I leave? Sometimes it is yours; sometimes it bricks.
Running the evaluation
- Get your own hands on it. A demo driven by a salesperson tells you how the salesperson uses it.
- Have a real cashier try it. Speed at the counter is worth more than any feature, and the person who will use it daily will spot in ten minutes what you would miss in a week.
- Test the exceptions, not the happy path.
- Ask for a reference in your format, not just your size. A steakhouse's experience does not predict a tiffin center's.
- Check the exit before you sign the entrance. Contract term, data export, hardware ownership.
Where ThaliPOS fits: a pre-launch product onboarding pilot restaurants, with published pricing not yet available — which by the standards of this page is a fact you should weigh, not gloss over. What ThaliPOS is →