Restaurant epos systems uk, and what a till system actually costs

What providers print for this type

How to price one honestly

1. Count the tills, then the add-ons. EPOS is priced per till or per location and the second till is rarely free. Kitchen displays, handhelds for table service and stock modules are commonly separate lines.
2. Separate the software fee from the card rate. Shopify prints £25 a month for POS Lite with a 1.7% in-person rate and £65 for POS Pro at 1.6%. Two numbers, two decisions; a provider that quotes only one of them is quoting half a price.
3. Ask what happens to the data if you leave. The menu, the stock file and the sales history are the switching cost, not the hardware. Ask what export exists before you have three years of it in there.
4. Match the system to the trade, not the demo. Restaurant EPOS and retail EPOS are genuinely different products: table plans, courses and split bills against barcodes, variants and stock takes. A system that does both usually does one of them thinly.
5. Check the hardware is not a lock-in. Some systems run on ordinary tablets and some on proprietary terminals. The second is a larger up-front cost and a harder exit; neither is wrong, but only one of them lets you change your mind cheaply.

Very little, and that is the finding. Of the providers in this index whose own pages cover a till system, the printed figures are subscription prices rather than complete costs: Shopify prints its POS plans at £25 and £65 a month, and the card rate beside them. The specialist hospitality vendors that dominate 'restaurant epos systems uk' as a search almost universally price by quotation, which is why this index carries what it can verify and says plainly where a page publishes nothing.

A restaurant system is sold with installation, menu building, staff training and often a hardware bundle, and each of those depends on the site. That is a real reason for a quotation and not a trick. What it means for a buyer is that the comparison has to happen on your own written quotes, on the same specification, and that a published price from a general-purpose system is the only anchor you will get.

A till subscription is a fixed monthly cost you can see. The transaction rate is a variable cost you cannot, and on a busy site it is much the larger of the two: at 1.7% a restaurant taking £40,000 a month on cards pays £680 in fees against a £65 subscription. That is the arithmetic that should drive the decision, and it is why the rate column in this index is the primary one.

Common questions

How much does an EPOS system cost in the UK?

Where it is published, a general-purpose till subscription runs roughly £25 to £65 a month per location, plus the transaction rate and any hardware. Specialist hospitality systems are almost always quoted rather than published, so a comparison has to be made on written quotes for the same specification.

What is the best EPOS system for a restaurant?

This index does not rank one, because ranking on unpublished prices would mean inventing them. What it can tell you is which providers publish a rate and a subscription at all, and that the transaction rate is usually the larger recurring cost on a busy site.

Do I need an EPOS system or just a card machine?

A card machine takes payment. An EPOS system also tracks what was sold, by whom and from what stock. If you do not need the second thing, the subscription is a cost with no return; plenty of small businesses run for years on a reader alone.

Can I use my own tablet for EPOS?

With some systems, yes, and it is the cheapest way in. Others require their own terminal, which raises the up-front cost and makes leaving harder. Ask which it is before the demo, not after.

Other machine types

• Compare Mobile card reader on printed rates
• Compare Countertop card machine on printed rates
• Compare Portable card machine on printed rates
• Compare EPOS till system on printed rates