Guides · Restaurants & cafés
How to choose restaurant POS software: 12 questions to ask
Published
In short
A restaurant POS has to survive Friday night with no internet, route tickets to the right kitchen station, treat modifiers as data, and turn every plate sold into ingredient consumption and a posted sale. Ask these twelve questions in the demo and insist on seeing each one, not hearing about it.
Why a restaurant POS is a different product
A retail till moves items off a shelf. A restaurant sells a promise — a dish that does not exist yet — and the POS has to coordinate the room, the kitchen, and the drawer while the promise is being kept. Menus change by time of day, one table has three bills, the cook needs to know “no garlic”, and the ingredients that just left the fridge need to leave the stock count too.
That is why “POS with a menu” is not enough. The twelve questions below are the ones that reveal whether a system was built for the floor or adapted from a checkout.
Service and the room
1. What happens when the internet goes down during service?
The only acceptable answer is “nothing, at the counter.” Orders, kitchen tickets, bills, payments, and the cash drawer must keep working from data stored on the device, with sales queued and synced when the connection returns. Ask to see it: disconnect the Wi-Fi mid-demo.
2. Can we draw our floor, and does the plan show live state?
Floors and tables laid out to match the room, with each table’s state — free, seated, fired, waiting on the pass — visible at a glance. Waiters should work from the plan, not from memory.
3. Can one table carry several bills?
Split bills are normal, not an edge case. Multiple bills on one table, moved and merged, each settled on its own.
4. Does the same device support several staff securely?
The device stays signed in to the business; each waiter or cashier unlocks with their own PIN, and their permissions follow them. A power cut should not log the till out of your workspace.
The kitchen
5. Do kitchen tickets route to the right station?
A KOT for the grill should print at the grill, the bar’s at the bar, with table, waiter, course, timing, and modifier lines. Routing should come from the item’s station, not from someone choosing a printer.
6. Are modifiers structured data or free text?
“Extra cheese, size large, no onion” must be data: priced correctly, printed correctly in the kitchen, and reported correctly afterwards. Free-text notes are where money and accuracy leak.
7. Do recipes consume stock when a dish sells?
If the answer is “you can adjust stock later”, food cost will always be a guess. Recipes tie dishes to ingredients; selling a plate should consume them at the station, and wastage — burnt, dropped, expired — should be recorded with reasons. See production and recipes.
8. Can stations run a trading day?
Issue stock to a station in the morning, count what is left at close, and read the variance per station per day. That is the difference between knowing a gap exists and knowing where it is.
Menus and money
9. Can menus change by time and channel?
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus that switch themselves; different prices for dine-in versus delivery; and a “today’s prices” list for the catch of the day. Schedules and channel pricing should be configuration, not a nightly re-entry.
10. Are tips handled properly?
Captured at settlement, attributed, and paid out through a tip payout — visible and fair. Sticky notes are not a tip system.
11. What does a settled bill write into the accounts?
The correct answer: a cash-session entry, a balanced sales voucher with tax split out, stock consumption via recipes, and live reports — automatically. If the accounts are a nightly export, you have two systems.
12. Can the group read one set of books across outlets?
Multiple outlets should share catalog and books, vary menus and prices per outlet where wanted, and scope staff access per branch, enforced by the server. Ownership should compare outlets from one screen.
What to do with the answers
Score each question as shown, described, or roadmap. Only “shown” counts. A system that demonstrates ten or more of the twelve on your own menu is a restaurant POS; one that describes them is a retail till with ambitions.
If you want to run the list against Flowyana, we will set up your menu, your floor, and a station printer, and go through all twelve live. Start on the restaurant solution page or book a demo.
See it in the product
Where this lives in Flowyana
Questions
Asked alongside this guide.
Do we need a separate kitchen display or printer system?
Not if the POS routes kitchen order tickets itself. Flowyana prints KOTs to station printers — grill, fryer, bar — from the POS’s own data, so ticket routing keeps working when the connection drops.
Can one POS run both a café counter and a dine-in floor?
Yes. The restaurant edition runs floors, tables, and kitchen routing; the retail edition runs a barcode counter. A business that is both can run both editions against the same stock and accounts.
How does a restaurant POS handle food cost?
Through recipes. Each dish carries a recipe; selling it consumes the ingredients at the station, purchases carry real costs into the books, and station consumption reports show variance per day. Food cost becomes something you read, not estimate.
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