6 key features of a Restaurant EPOS

Frankie Neale • 22 February 2022

An EPOS or electronic point of sale system is the central management system for your business. A restaurant EPOS system is not only responsible for processing orders & taking payments, it should help you to run your business. This can mean managing stock, generating relevant & insightful reports, managing staff, and even taking bookings.

Flexible table plan

Your restaurant EPOS should allow you to easily draw and edit bespoke table plans, reflecting your venue with not only tables but structural elements too. Creating multiple plans to use for different areas of your venue if needed.

Once you’ve created your table plan, you can use this across the EPOS screens to easily add orders to tables or view, print and pay bills.

Allergen & nutritional info

Allergens are a key consideration for a restaurant, so having all the relevant allergen information for your menu available to staff at the touch of an button, saves staff having to try and remember everything, or nip back and forth to the kitchen asking questions. You can also look to include all these allergens directly into the mobile ordering menu for guests to view directly themselves.

Nutritional info can also be included which will become mandatory for those businesses with over 250 staff to display on menus from 1st April. Whilst this won’t directly impact smaller businesses, customer expectations may begin to move in this direction once it becomes more common.

Portable restaurant EPOS showing table plan

Flexible ordering options

Table side

Restaurants have moved away from staff writing down orders at the table and then heading back to a service area or bar to key the orders into the EPOS. Staff are looking to have a portable EPOS they can take to the table to input orders. This not only reduces errors and ensures orders are routed to the relevant areas as quickly as possible, but having the order process take place table side, means your EPOS can prompt questions about how food should be cooked and ensure staff are upselling sides and extras where possible.

Mobile ordering

Mobile ordering has become far more accepted during the pandemic, and while most restaurants and guests will likely favour having a personal interaction to place their first orders, having an integrated mobile ordering option just allows guests to quickly order additional drinks or desserts without needing to flag down a staff member. The integration element is key here, meaning all the orders come through directly into your EPOS and can’t be missed. You don’t want to be running two systems side by side and having to key orders from one system to another.

Click & collect or delivery

As venues were forced to close over the past two years some have found a really promising revenue stream from click & collect and delivery, which looks set to continue as customers now demand more exciting options when they eat at home.

A good restaurant EPOS should allow you to either manage a click & collect / delivery service yourself, saving you paying any third party fees for additional systems. Or be able to pull all the orders from the likes of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and JustEat into your EPOS, to manage everything centrally.

Our mobile ordering solution works in and out of venue, so you can direct customers to a web page to place orders for either click & collect or delivery if you have drivers to facilitate this. We also have the ability to pull orders through from other delivery platforms into your EPOS. This not only means orders can’t be missed, but your stock will be correctly managed, and all the revenue and profit will be included in your reporting.

Industry relevant reporting

Whatever size of restaurant you’re running you will want access to intuitive EPOS reporting and key insights in real-time. Tracking sales, stock, staff hours and expenditure, as well as the ability to track the popularity of particular menu items and specials.

We talk about what we consider to be the top 5 hospitality EPOS reports in a recent blog article.

Interactive kitchen screens

Whist routing printed tickets to different printers will work for many restaurants, there are some real benefits to be using an interactive kitchen screen.

These enable you to receive and acknowledge orders, keep track of who is preparing them and send ‘food ready’ messages to the front of house. Our restaurant EPOS also enables you to send other messages between front and back of house, for example a mains away message, or to let staff know that items have run out, or wait times have increased.

Using a kitchen screen enables better communication between front of house and the kitchen, allows you to track food service times, and cuts out unnecessary printing.

Booking system

Many restaurant EPOS systems will have a third party integration with existing booking software, enabling the two systems to talk to each other. This can work well if there is a particular booking system you want to use and it has a good integration with your EPOS. However, this does involve learning and paying for two separate systems and having your data split between them.

A fully in-built booking system, will see you making cost savings, but also ensure your customer has a smooth interaction process all the way through from booking enquiry through to arrival at the venue, with any deposits paid being credited to their tab on arrival. It also means all your data from the initial booking request to the sales made to the guests when they arrive is all in one system.

To find out more about our integrated Restaurant EPOS, and how it could work in your venue get in touch.

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a bartender makes a cocktail while two other barstaff and two guests watch

How to make sure your restaurant, pub, or bar is ready for Christmas

by Matt Hall • 10 September 2025

There’s no such thing as ‘too early to think about Christmas’ when you work in hospitality. And after a bruising year that’s brought major challenges for the industry, December is more important than ever for many businesses. When it comes to crafting the perfect festive atmosphere, you’re the experts there – we’re simply here to show you how getting things like your tech systems, menus, staffing, and gift cards sorted now, means you’ll make the most of Christmas and manage your venue more effectively. Optimise your offerings and boost profit margins No doubt you’ll want to capture the spirit of the season with a festive menu. Roast meats and Christmas puddings are a must, but don’t forget a vegan option too. Whatever you choose, make sure your dishes balance popularity and profitability. Recipe management tools let you input ingredient costs and amounts, so you get precise costs for every item on your menu. It then automatically calculates GP so you can easily set the right prices both for individual items and festive set menus. This works really well for food, but also for cocktails, and festive drinks you might make on-site, such as mulled wine or cider. Using technology to manage bookings When it comes to Christmas bookings, balance is key. You want more bums on seats, but you don’t want to overwhelm your kitchen and Front-of-House staff – especially when bookings around Christmas tend to be larger. A flexible booking system helps you maintain control. Those office Christmas lunches often have ten or twenty guests, so it helps to keep them separate from your usual bookings. Asking for pre-orders and prepayments makes it much easier to manage those big complicated bookings. Email links go out to organisers so everything can be booked and paid for in advance. This guarantees your cash flow ahead of time and means your kitchen can prepare and ensure the right amount of stock. You can also create custom drink packages to upsell during the booking process.