Full disclosure before we start: we make Seamless, a restaurant EPOS. This guide is the checklist we wish every operator brought to demos, including ours. Every feature below is explained vendor-neutrally first, with the questions that separate systems that genuinely do it from systems that have it on a slide.
Every restaurant EPOS brochure lists the same twenty features. The problem is that the words hide enormous differences: "table management" can mean a drag and drop floor plan that mirrors your dining room, or a numbered list. "Kitchen printing" can mean intelligent routing by course and station, or one printer that spits out everything. This guide covers what each feature should actually do, roughly in the order they'll affect your service.
1. A table plan that matches your room
The floor plan is the heart of a restaurant EPOS. It should be one you build yourself, by dragging tables into the same positions they occupy in your room, with separate areas for the dining room, bar and terrace. During service, every till should show the same live picture: which tables are seated, what they've ordered, and how long since the last course.
Ask in the demo: can I rearrange the floor plan myself, without calling support? How many areas does it support? If two waiters open the same table on two devices, what happens?
2. Modifiers that capture the whole order
Steak temperatures, allergies, sauces, sides, "no onions": modifiers are how the till captures reality. Done well, they prompt staff for every required choice (so nothing reaches the kitchen incomplete), offer upsells at the right moment, and print the full story on the ticket. Done badly, they're a free-text field and a prayer.
This is also an allergen-safety feature. Since Natasha's Law, the cost of a mistranscribed allergy note is not a refund, it is a headline. Forced prompts beat memory.
Ask in the demo: can a modifier be required? Can it carry a price? Can the kitchen ticket distinguish an instruction from an item?
3. Kitchen printing by station (or a kitchen screen)
A restaurant order is really three or four orders: starters to the cold station, mains to the pass, desserts to the pastry corner, drinks to the bar. Category-based print routing sends each line to the right printer with a clear ticket structure, so the kitchen reads tickets instead of deciphering handwriting, and the pass isn't shouting.
Ask in the demo: how many print stations are supported? What happens to the ticket if a printer is offline? Can a single dish print to two stations?
4. Bills that split the way customers actually pay
Table of six: one card for the food, two splitting the wine, one paying cash. If your EPOS can't split by item and by share, your staff end up doing arithmetic at the table while the queue for the card machine grows. Splitting should take taps, not maths, and every part-payment should reconcile against the same bill. (Here's how split payments work in Seamless, as an example of the level of detail to expect from any vendor.)
5. Integrated payments, without the lock-in
Integrated payments means the card machine gets the total from the till automatically: no re-keying, no miskeys, no end-of-day mystery gaps. Every modern system offers this. The question is whose card machine.
This is the biggest structural difference in the market. Some systems (Square, increasingly Lightspeed and EposNow) only integrate properly with their own payment processing, which means your card rates are set by the company you just married for your till. Others integrate with the card machine market: Dojo, Teya, SumUp, Zettle, so you can keep or renegotiate your rates independently. In a business running thousands of card transactions a month, this single decision is often worth more than the software fee.
Ask in the demo: which card machines integrate? What happens to my software price if I don't take your payments? If I leave, what do I keep?
6. Offline mode that actually works
Routers fail on Saturdays. It's a law of hospitality. A restaurant EPOS should keep taking orders, printing to the kitchen and recording payments while the internet is down, then sync everything when it returns. Cloud-only systems that stop dead without wifi are counter-service toys wearing restaurant clothes.
Ask in the demo: pull the router cable out, then try to open a table, print a ticket and take a payment. Watch the vendor's face.
7. Reporting you'll actually read
Covers, spend per head, top sellers, peak-hour heat maps and sales by staff member, viewable live from a phone or laptop, not exported from the till on a USB stick. The test is whether the numbers help you make Tuesday's decisions: staffing levels, menu culls, price changes, and whether the new brunch menu is earning its prep time.
8. Stock and ingredient control
Food margin dies quietly: over-portioning, waste that's never logged, and deliveries that don't match invoices. Ingredient-level stock control tracks expected versus actual usage so variance shows up in a report, not in the year-end accounts. (This matters even more on the wet side: our Stock Manager exists mostly because of pub cellars, and restaurants with serious bar revenue should read the pub EPOS perspective too.)
Honest caveat: stock control only works if someone maintains it. If nobody in your operation will log waste and count deliveries, buy the reporting, skip the promises.
9. Bookings that talk to the till
Reservations and the floor plan should know about each other, and commission-per-cover booking platforms are a tax on your busiest nights. Look either for a built-in diary or a zero-commission integration (Seamless partners with TableSense for exactly this reason). Whichever route, the test is: when a booking arrives, does the table plan know?
10. Staff permissions and speed of training
Voids, refunds and discounts are where money leaks and where staff get accused unfairly; per-staff permissions and a clean audit trail protect both sides. And in an industry with 30%+ staff turnover, how long a new starter needs before they can serve unsupervised is a real cost. The honest benchmark for a modern system is minutes, not shifts.
The features that can wait
Editorial honesty section. These get demoed hard because they demo well, but for most independent restaurants they're year-two problems: customer-facing displays, white-label ordering apps, built-in loyalty schemes, and AI anything. None of them will save a service the way fast order entry and correct kitchen tickets will. Buy the fundamentals first; bolt on the rest when the fundamentals are boring.
What it all costs
Realistic 2026 pricing for an independent UK restaurant runs from £0 to about £150 per till per month depending on brand, modules and payment terms, and the headline rarely includes everything. The two questions that expose true cost: what does year two cost with all the modules I actually need, and what do my card payments cost at my real volume? (Seamless is £0/month when we introduce you to a payments partner, £24/month with your own provider, £39/month for Pro, with pricing published in full and no contract. We publish it because we can; be suspicious of anyone who quotes only after a call.)
The demo checklist
- Ring in a table of six with two allergies and a steak temperature. Time it.
- Split the bill three ways: by item, by share, part cash.
- Unplug the router. Keep serving.
- Ask which card machines integrate and what the software costs without their payments.
- Move a table mid-order and merge two tabs.
- Open the reports on a phone and find last Friday's spend per head.
- Ask for the exit terms in writing: contract length, cancellation fee, data export.
A system that passes all seven is a genuine restaurant EPOS. Most pass four.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between EPOS and POS?
Nothing meaningful in 2026. EPOS (electronic point of sale) is the traditional UK term; POS is the international one. Vendors use them interchangeably, and so do we.
Is an iPad EPOS good enough for a busy restaurant?
Yes, and it has been for a decade: the team behind Seamless built IntelligentPos, one of the UK's first big iPad EPOS systems, and sold it to iZettle in 2016. Modern tablets outperform the embedded computers inside most legacy tills, cost less to replace, and staff already know how to use them. The platform question matters less than the software: Seamless runs on iPad, Android and all-in-one units with the same features.
How much should a restaurant EPOS cost per month?
Between £0 and roughly £150 per till per month. The spread is explained by modules, contracts and payments: systems that control your card processing can afford cheap software because they earn it back on every transaction. Always price the whole package at your card volume.
Can I keep my current card machine?
Depends entirely on the EPOS. Seamless integrates with Dojo, Teya, SumUp and Zettle; Square requires Square; several big names penalise outside payments. Ask before the demo, not after the contract.
The bottom line
A restaurant EPOS earns its keep in the ninety minutes when every table is full. Judge every feature against that moment: does it make the round of orders faster, the kitchen tickets clearer, the bill split cleaner, the numbers more honest? If you want to see how we answer those questions, start with our restaurant EPOS page, compare the UK systems side by side, or try Seamless free and run the demo checklist on us first.