Every quote for a restaurant till reads the same: a screen, a drawer, a printer, a support line and a monthly figure. None of that tells you whether the thing will still be working for you in year three. What decides that is what the till does with an order while the room is full, and what it lets you get back out afterwards. Here is that list, in the order it bites.
What the till does between the table and the pass
An order has to reach the kitchen in the shape the kitchen works in, and it has to get there without a server standing at a screen. That means modifiers that survive the journey, because 'no onions' lost on the way is a plate that comes back; it means courses held and fired rather than everything printing at once; and it means a change to an order already sent showing up as a change, not as a second order. Ask to see a table order amended after it has gone. That one demonstration separates tills more reliably than any feature list.
What it does when three things happen at once
A Friday service is a queue at the counter, a collection order arriving from your own site and a table wanting to split a bill six ways, all inside a minute. The failure mode worth asking about is not a crash, it is a till that makes each of those a separate screen with its own list. If collection orders arrive somewhere the floor cannot see, somebody will be reading them off a tablet on the pass by the second week, and the record you end the night with will be in two places.
What you can get back out of it
A till holds the only record of what your business sold. Before you sign, ask whether you can export every order with its items, covers and totals, in a file you can open, without raising a ticket. Ask how much history is kept and whether it is trimmed after a year. This is the question with the longest tail: a product you cannot leave with your own numbers is one you will renew for reasons that have nothing to do with liking it.
Where the UK and US versions differ
The same product is sold as an epos system in Britain and a pos system in America, and the boxes are the same. What differs is what is bundled: UK quotes usually assume you also want card processing from the same supplier, and the monthly figure and the transaction rate are quoted together in a way that makes either hard to compare. Ask for the software price on its own. If it cannot be given, that is the answer to a different question you should also have asked.
A Friday night, worked through the till
Seven o'clock: table nine orders two courses and a bottle, the starters fire, the mains are held. Ten past: a collection order arrives from the website for eight fifteen and lands in the kitchen queue between two table orders, on the same printer, with its time on the ticket. Quarter past: table nine adds a side and swaps a main; the change reaches the pass as a change, and the original ticket is not cooked twice. Half past: table four, six covers, asks to split four ways with two paying together, and the till splits by seat rather than by arithmetic on a napkin. Ten o'clock: the night's record holds forty-one orders, one hundred and eight covers, a spend per head, the comped dessert marked as comped and the void marked as a void with a reason. Every one of those is a demonstration you can ask for, and a till that does them all on a demo will do them on a Friday.
The demo questions, in the order they bite
Amend an order that has already gone to the kitchen. Take a website order and show me where it lands. Split a bill by seat. Show me the export of last month's orders as a file I can open. Tell me the software price without the card processing, and the card rate without the software. Show me what the till does when the internet goes down mid-service. Show me how a menu change reaches the online menu and the printed one. Six questions, twenty minutes, and a vendor who answers all six from the product rather than the brochure is selling a till this page would buy. The sheet on this site sizes the roll-out from your tables and your menu changes before you sit down.
Questions people ask about epos for restaurants
Is EPOS just the British word for POS?
Yes. EPOS is electronic point of sale and POS is point of sale; UK vendors write the first and US vendors the second, and the product is the same. If a comparison seems to be between an epos system and a pos system, it is between two vendors, not two categories.
How much should a single site expect to pay a month?
Published tiers for a UK restaurant taking its own orders run from about £99 a month to £199 for a multichannel plan; Storekit's own pricing page listed those two figures on 2026-09-06. Hardware, card processing and installation are usually priced separately, which is why the monthly figure alone is a poor comparison.
Do I need one till per site or one per terminal?
Most products for independents price per site and let you add terminals, which is what you want with one room. Suites aimed at chains often price per terminal, and that difference shows up as soon as you add a second screen at the counter.
What should the till do when the internet drops?
Keep taking orders and printing tickets, queue the payments and the sync, and catch up when the connection returns, without a server noticing more than a warning. A cloud till with no offline mode stops the room dead at the worst moment, and it is the one question every vendor would rather you did not ask on the demo.