What is a restaurant POS?
A restaurant POS — point of sale — is the system a member of staff uses to take an order, price it, record how it was paid for and pass it to the kitchen. In a restaurant it is doing more than a shop till: it has to handle a menu that changes, orders that arrive from several places at once, and food that has to be made before it can be handed over.
What a restaurant POS actually does
At minimum it holds the menu, builds an order, applies the right price including any discount or promotion, records the payment, and produces a receipt. That is the part every POS has.
What separates one from another is everything around that: whether the kitchen sees the order without somebody carrying a ticket, whether the same menu is on your website, whether stock goes down when food is made, and whether you can tell at the end of the week what sold.
The question that matters most: how many menus are you keeping?
A restaurant that has a till from one company, an ordering site from another and a delivery-platform menu from a third is maintaining three menus. Every price change has to be made three times, and the day somebody forgets is the day a customer is charged the wrong amount.
This is the single largest practical difference between POS products, and it is worth more attention than the feature list. Ask what shares the menu with the till.
What to check before you buy
How is it priced — per terminal, per location, per order, or per business? A per-terminal licence gets expensive the moment you add a second till, and a percentage of every order is a cost that grows exactly as you succeed.
What hardware is required, and is it yours or theirs? A POS that runs in a browser runs on a laptop or tablet you already own; one that needs proprietary terminals is a hardware purchase before it is a software one.
What happens to your data if you leave — can you get your menu, your customers and your order history out?
Who can do what? A cashier being able to discount an order without authority is a real and common source of loss.
What a POS is not
It is not an accounting system, and it is not a payment provider. It records what was sold and how it was paid for; the money itself moves through whichever provider you use, and your accountant reads the reports.
It is also not a marketplace. A delivery platform brings you orders and charges commission for them; a POS is the system you run regardless of where the order came from.