A restaurant POS is the billing and ordering system of a restaurant. It includes the billing counter, the handheld devices that waiters carry and the screens in the kitchen. It often also includes online ordering, stock records, staff payroll and reports, sold together as one system. POS stands for point of sale, the place where a sale is billed. A restaurant POS is a kind of POS software, built for tables and kitchens.
Why does a restaurant need its own kind of POS? In a shop, a customer picks items and pays in one moment. In a restaurant, one table's order grows over an hour: starters, then the main course, then dessert. Each dish may carry a request, such as "less spicy" or "no onion". Different dishes are cooked at different stations. And at the end, the bill may be split between friends.
Here is a typical case. A family of five sits at table 7 in a restaurant in Jaipur. The waiter takes the order on his handheld device: two dal baati churma, one laal maas, one paneer marked "less spicy" and five rotis. When he presses Send, the POS creates a kitchen order ticket, or KOT, a list that tells the kitchen what to cook. The KOT appears on the kitchen display system. The rotis go to the tandoor station, and the curries go to the curry station. Later, the family adds two lassis, and the POS adds them to table 7. The final bill is ₹1,450. The POS adds 5% GST, ₹72.50, so the total is ₹1,522.50. The family pays by scanning the UPI QR code printed on the bill, and the POS marks table 7 as free.
Behind each sale, the POS does more work. It reduces the stock of each ingredient used, so the manager knows when to order more paneer. It receives bookings from restaurant table booking, and delivery orders from the online order aggregator. It adds points for regular customers through loyalty programme software. It records each employee's shifts, which the payroll system turns into salaries.
Many restaurant POS companies also process the payments themselves, through payments built into business software, and earn a small fee on each one. Because they see the restaurant's daily sales, some also offer it a loan that is repaid as a share of future sales. This is revenue-based financing. Selling payments and loans inside business software is called embedded finance. Some of the largest restaurant POS companies, which sell mainly to restaurants in the United States, build much of this software in India.