What is a restaurant POS system?

On a busy Friday it does five jobs at once, and it does them in front of a queue.

It takes the order with every modifier attached, no onions, sauce on the side, chips instead of salad, so the kitchen sees what was actually asked for. It fires that ticket to the pass, to a printer or a screen. It takes the payment and records the tip. It holds the price of every item so nobody has to remember what a large chips costs at the weekend. And when you're closing up, it does the cash up: card takings, cash takings, voids, comps, refunds, and who was on when.

That last part is the one most owners underrate. A till that logs every void and discount against a staff PIN gives you an honest picture of your shrink. A till that doesn't will cost you more over a year than the subscription ever did.

Ignore the feature grid for a minute. Cheap systems don't fail on the exotic stuff, they fail on the basics, usually at eight o'clock on a Saturday. Check these before anything else.

Software commonly starts somewhere around €50 to €80 a month for a single till. That headline is rarely what lands on the invoice.

Hardware is the first surprise. A terminal, a cash drawer, a thermal receipt printer and a decent router come to several hundred euro each, and some vendors will only sell you theirs. Then the add-ons: online ordering, a kitchen screen, table management, loyalty, an accounts export. On most systems each one is priced on its own, and three of them at €25 a month is another €900 a year you didn't budget for.

Card processing is a separate bill again. Interchange on consumer debit and credit cards is capped by regulation in the EU and the UK, but what your provider charges you sits on top of that, so read the merchant agreement and not the brochure. Watch for a monthly minimum, a PCI fee, and a higher rate on business and non-EEA cards.

The honest comparison is two sums. What does year one cost including hardware and setup? What does year three cost, once you've added a second till and a kitchen screen? Cheap headline pricing usually loses the second sum badly.

Eclyde is priced the other way round: €59 a month plus 5% per order, or a flat €199 a month with no commission at all, €169 a month if you pay for the year. Every feature is on both plans. The sums are on the pricing page if you want to run them against your own takings.

A legacy system keeps your data on a box in the back office. It runs whether or not the broadband is up, which is a genuine advantage. The costs show up elsewhere: an engineer visit to change a price band, a support contract with a call-out fee, hardware you can only buy from one place, and a backup nobody has tested since it was installed. If the box dies on a bank holiday, you're serving off a notepad.

A cloud system keeps your data on servers you don't maintain. Updates arrive on their own, you can look at today's takings from your phone while you're at the cash and carry, and adding a second site doesn't mean a second server. The trade-off is the connection, which is the next section.

For most independent restaurants and takeaways the cloud is the right call now, on one condition: the system has to keep serving when the line drops.

Ask the vendor this exact question and make them answer it precisely, because the answers vary wildly. Some cloud tills freeze completely and your staff are writing tickets by hand. Some keep taking orders locally and sync everything up when the line comes back. Card payments are a separate question again, since that depends on your terminal and whether your acquirer permits offline authorisation, which usually carries a value limit and some risk.

Two practical moves. Put a 4G backup on the router, or keep a mobile hotspot behind the till that somebody has actually tested. Then pull the broadband cable on a quiet Tuesday afternoon and watch what your system does, before a Friday does it for you.

Eclyde's POS keeps taking orders with the line down and syncs when it returns, which is the behaviour you want from anything cloud based.

Less than most quotes suggest. A takeaway doing counter and phone orders can run on one terminal, one printer and a card machine. Add screens as the volume justifies them, not before.

Bring this list to the demo and write the answers down. The gap between what's said on a call and what's in the contract is where most regret lives.

Switching is less painful than owners fear, as long as you don't do it in December.

Pick a quiet fortnight. Get your menu built and then have a chef read it, item by item, including modifier prices, because that's where the errors hide. Run a training shift on a Tuesday with the new system taking real orders and the old one still on the counter. Do your first Friday with someone from the provider reachable on a phone, not on email. Export your old sales history before you cancel the old contract, not after, because access usually dies with the subscription.

One more thing people forget: tell your accountant the week before, not the week after. The reports will look different and the VAT period will thank you.