Till systems for restaurants: what to look for

What a till system actually does for you

A till system is not the screen your guests tap their card against. That is the tip above the water. The rest is where orders, payments, stock, staff and numbers come together, and where you read back the next day what happened.

Modern systems therefore do far more than take payment:

• manage your menu, with variants, extras and dishes that have sold out
• route orders to the right place, on a kitchen screen or a printed ticket at the bar
• track stock, from crates in the cellar to ingredients per dish
• break turnover down by part of the day, dish, member of staff and channel
• keep your VAT separated across two rates, because food and alcohol do not sit in the same box
• pass data to your bookkeeping, your rota software and your own ordering site

Underneath sits the hardware: screens, receipt printers, a cash drawer, card terminals, sometimes handhelds for table service and a kitchen screen. The software usually lives in the cloud, so you can look at this afternoon’s turnover from home.

So the question is not which system can do the most. Almost every serious system does that list. The question is what you genuinely use at eight o’clock on a Friday, and how smoothly it behaves when the room is full.

Start from your busiest hour, not from the feature list

Put the brochures down and walk through a Friday night in your head. Which actions do you repeat twenty times? Taking an order. Splitting a bill. A dish without onion. A card payment. A ticket to the kitchen.

Count the taps for each one. A system that handles your most frequent action two taps faster is worth more by the end of the year than a system with thirty features you never open. That is why ranked lists of the best tills help you so little: they rank on features, and you are buying time.

What matters most differs by type of restaurant. Find the row closest to yours.

What a till has to handle in the Netherlands

Much of what you read online about till systems is written for the American market: different pricing models, different payment methods, different tax rules. Three things differ enough here to change your choice.

Two VAT rates on one bill

Food and non-alcoholic drinks fall under the reduced rate of 9%. Alcohol falls under 21%. One table with lunch and three beers therefore produces a bill carrying two rates, and your till should get that right without anyone thinking about it. Ask for a VAT breakdown in the daily report, not just a turnover total. Your bookkeeper works from that breakdown, and if the till does not produce it, somebody does it by hand.

Payment the way it is done here

In the Netherlands the vast majority of payments are contactless debit card, and those transactions are usually charged as a fixed fee per payment rather than a percentage of turnover. American pricing of a percentage plus a few cents per transaction does not transfer. So price your till and your payment processing separately. Ask as well whether you may choose your own card terminal, or whether the contract ties you to the supplier’s payments package.

Records you can get back out

Dutch tax rules require you to keep your administration for seven years. Your till is the source of your turnover records, so that data has to come out in a usable form. Ask the uncomfortable question straight away: if I switch in two years, do I take my turnover history, my menu and my customer data with me, and in what file format?

Cloud, local or hybrid, and what happens when the internet drops

Till software comes in three shapes. You notice the difference not on a Tuesday morning but at the worst moment of the week.

Nearly every supplier claims to have an offline mode. That phrase covers a great deal of ground. Ask function by function: taking orders, sending them to the kitchen, printing tickets, card payments, and what happens to orders arriving through your ordering site during the outage. Card terminals often have their own mobile connection and carry on when the wifi is down, but do not assume it.

Do this in the demo: ask whether you may switch the wifi off, then watch what still works. A supplier who would rather not has already answered the question.

What it costs, and where the costs hide

The figure on the website is one line of your invoice. These are the others:

• Subscription per till per month, not per restaurant. Two tills and a handheld each count separately.
• Transaction fees for debit cards, credit cards and online payments.
• Hardware: screens, receipt printers, cash drawers, kitchen displays. Buying costs once, leasing costs for longer.
• Installation, entering your menu and training your team.
• Integrations billed separately, such as bookkeeping, rotas or your ordering site.
• Support outside office hours, which is precisely when you need it.

Watch the contract length above all. A low monthly figure on a multi-year term is not cheap, it is spread out. Ask about the annual price increase, because it lives in the small print and compounds across the whole term. Ask too what happens to the hardware when you stop: is it yours by then, or were you renting all along?

Put the answers from two or three suppliers side by side and total them out to five years. That is the only comparison that holds, and usually the one that changes the order.

Integrations decide whether it works in practice

A till that stands on its own works fine until you notice how much you retype. Every action entered twice costs time and invites mistakes.

Bookkeeping

The day’s turnover should land in your bookkeeping automatically, broken down by VAT rate and payment method. Ask for a real export from a live restaurant, not a screenshot from a demo.

Delivery platforms

Orders from Thuisbezorgd and Uber Eats can arrive directly in your till, so no extra tablet bleeps next to the printer. That saves typing and errors on the ticket. Be honest about what it does not do: the commission stays exactly what it was. An integration makes the platform cheaper in time, not in money.

Your own ordering site

Orders coming in through your own site should surface in the same place as an order taken at the counter. If they arrive in a separate little window, your team treats them as a second system, and on a busy evening they get missed. This is also the channel that carries no commission, which makes it the one that most deserves a clean integration.

Always ask for the list of existing integrations and note the word in front of it. A direct integration is a different animal from one routed through a middleman, with its own monthly fee and its own outages.

The guests your till forgets

Someone walks in, eats, pays and leaves. Your till knows what they ordered and at what time. Who they are, it does not know. And you cannot invite anybody back when all you hold is a ticket number.

That is the quietest cost in hospitality. You do not need a Dutch percentage to see the mechanism: from most guests you keep nothing you could make contact with. Through a delivery platform it is slightly worse, because there the guest exists as a customer, just not as your customer.

A till that captures data at the moment of the transaction reverses that. A digital receipt, a loyalty programme inside the system, an order through your own site with an email address attached: each one moves somebody from anonymous to known. In the demo, look at what that moment feels like on the guest’s side, because if it costs three extra screens nobody will use it.

Do it properly, though. Ask permission, record what you will use the data for and keep unsubscribing simple. The GDPR is clear on this, and a customer list is only worth something when it is clean.

Tonight, look in your current system and count how many of last month’s guests you can find by name or email address. That number is your starting point.

How to judge a demo

Every supplier demonstrates well on their own material. A demo with four dishes and one table tells you nothing about your restaurant. Bring your own reality.

1. Send your menu in advance and have it loaded into the system. How long that takes is information in itself.
2. Replay your busiest half hour: three tables at once, a dish without onion, a bill split in two, a card payment abandoned halfway.
3. Put someone from your team behind the screen who has no appetite for new software. That is your real test user, not you.
4. Ask whether the wifi can be switched off.
5. Ask for two references from restaurants your size, and actually ring them.

Read the one and two star reviews as well, not the five star ones. You are not looking for angry people, you are looking for repetition. When ten people independently write the same thing about support, about costs that creep up or about a system that freezes during service, that is not coincidence. Ask the restaurant two streets away too, which has your guests and your peaks.

Then the dull step that saves the most money: read the contract before you sign. Term, notice period, annual increases, ownership of the hardware, ownership of your data and the response time of support on a Friday night. Those are six lines of text you will live with for five years.