What Makes a Restaurant POS Different?
A restaurant POS (point of sale) system is fundamentally different from a retail POS. Retail is simple: scan item, take payment, done. Restaurants deal with:
- Table management — assigning orders to tables, splitting bills, moving guests
- Kitchen communication — sending orders to different stations (grill, bar, dessert)
- Menu modifiers — extra cheese, no onion, medium-rare, dairy-free
- Course sequencing — entrées before mains, holding dessert until requested
- Split billing — dividing a table's bill by item, equally, or custom amounts
- Tipping — integrated tipping functionality
- Real-time inventory — 86'd items need to disappear from the menu immediately
If you try to run a restaurant on a generic POS, you'll spend more time fighting the software than serving customers.