Choosing a POS for a new café: the questions to ask before you sign

The point-of-sale system is the one piece of software a café can't open without. It takes the money, prints the ticket for the bar, tracks what sold, and holds the numbers you'll run the business on. It's also the hardest one to switch later: your menu, your modifiers, your reports and often your card processing all live inside it.

This is the first post in our series on setting up the tech for a new café. It doesn't recommend a brand. It gives you the questions to ask every vendor, so you can compare quotes on the same terms and pick the one that fits how your café actually works.

Vendor details below come from each vendor's own help pages as of November 2026. Plans and features change, so check the current page before you decide.

Start with how your café sells

Before you talk to a sales rep, write down how orders happen in your café. A two-person coffee bar with a single counter needs something different from a café with table service, a kitchen and a patio.

• Where do people order? At the counter, at the table, at a kiosk, online, through delivery apps?
• Where do orders go? A printer at the bar, a kitchen printer, a kitchen display screen?
• How do people pay? Card, phone wallet, cash, gift cards, house accounts?
• How many people ring at once during the morning rush?
• What do you need to see every week? Sales by hour, top items, labor %, tips?

Keep this page in front of you in every demo. A good POS for someone else's café can be the wrong one for yours.

1. Hardware: what sits on the counter

List every device you'll need and get a line-item price for each:

• The register: a terminal, a tablet on a stand, or both.
• Card readers: at the counter, and handhelds if you take payment at the table.
• A customer-facing screen for tips and receipts, if you want one.
• Printers: receipts, and a separate printer or kitchen display for the bar or kitchen.
• A cash drawer.
• Spares. What happens when the one card reader stops working at 8 a.m.?

Then ask:

1. Can I use my own tablets, or only theirs?
2. Is the hardware bought, leased or included in a plan? If it's leased or included, what happens to it if you cancel?
3. Does the hardware only work with their payment processing? If so, switching processors later means replacing it.
4. How fast is a replacement if a device fails, and who pays for it?
5. Does it need a wired internet connection? Toast's platform guide says its "terminals and access points typically have hard-wired Ethernet connections to the router" and that "Toast support recommends using hardwired connections where possible" (Toast: Offline mode overview). If your vendor says the same, plan cable runs before the counter is built.

2. Fees and the contract

A POS has two bills: the software and the card processing. Get both in writing.

Our post on card processing fees and surcharging shows how to read a processing statement and find your real rate, and the 13-week cash flow forecast is where the monthly POS bill belongs.

One rule: if a fee isn't on the quote, ask whether it exists. Then ask for the answer in writing.

3. Integrations: what it talks to

Your POS will need to share data with other tools: accounting, payroll, online ordering, delivery apps, loyalty, scheduling, inventory. Every tool that can't read your POS's sales means someone typing numbers from one screen into another.

Ask each vendor:

1. Which tools connect today? Ask for a list, not "we integrate with everything".
2. What exactly does each connection share? Sales totals only, or every item and modifier? Tips? Refunds? Employees?
3. How often does it sync? Live, every few minutes, once a night?
4. Who builds and supports the connection, the POS vendor or the other company?
5. Can I export my own data, such as items, sales history and customers, as a spreadsheet if I leave?

Be specific about the tools you already use. If you plan to run scheduling, checklists or inventory in Mays, know that Mays connects to three POS systems today: Square, Clover and Union POS (Integrations overview). It doesn't connect to Toast or other POS systems yet. From Square, Mays brings in:

Union POS sends sales. Each location takes its sales from one POS, so revenue isn't counted twice. See Connecting Square and Connecting Union POS.

4. Offline mode: what happens when the internet drops

Most current POS systems are cloud-based, and that's worth understanding before you sign. Square's support center says: "The Square point of sale apps require an internet connection at all times to function optimally." Toast's platform guide says that "sending credit card information to credit card networks for authorization and connecting with third-party integrations, must be performed through the internet."

Both have an offline mode, and the details matter. Square, for example, says that offline payments "will process automatically when you reconnect your device to the internet within 24 hours (no later than 72 hours)", that "EBT/SNAP, Afterpay, Cash App Pay, Square Gift Cards, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, and manually entered card numbers are not available with offline payments", and that "You're responsible for any expired, declined, or disputed payments accepted while taking offline payments" (Square: Process offline payments). Toast describes offline mode as a way for "a restaurant to continue functioning as normally as possible if a Toast POS device is forced offline" (Toast: Offline mode overview).

Ask every vendor the same five questions:

1. Does offline mode take cards, or cash only?
2. Which payment types stop working offline?
3. How long can I stay offline, and when must payments upload?
4. Who carries the risk if an offline card payment is declined later?
5. What happens to online orders while we're offline?

Write the answers down. A later post in this series turns them into a downtime plan for your staff.

5. Reporting: the numbers you'll use every week

A POS demo always shows a beautiful dashboard. What you need is a short list of reports you'll actually open:

• Sales by day and by hour, to staff the rush and the quiet hours.
• Item and modifier mix, to see what sells and what an extra shot is worth.
• Discounts, voids and refunds, by employee.
• Tips by employee, if you pool or share tips.
• Payment types, to reconcile cash and card at close.
• CSV export of all of it.

Ask the rep to open each report live with sample data, not slides. Then check whether the numbers you'll want next to sales, like labor cost and food cost, come from the POS or from somewhere else. Our posts on prime cost every week, the weekly labor cost review and forecasting sales from POS history show what you'll do with them.

6. Staff, permissions and support

Two last areas that are easy to skip in a demo:

• Logins and permissions. Can every employee have their own PIN or login? Can you require a manager to approve a refund, a void or a big discount? Can you see who did what? This matters for your cash handling and for the day someone leaves.
• Support. What hours is phone support open? Is it open at 6 a.m. on a Saturday, when your café is? Is there an onboarding call, and who sets up your menu?

A worksheet for comparing quotes

Copy this table into a spreadsheet, one column per vendor, and fill it in during each demo:

Pick the vendor with the fewest blanks and the fewest "we'll get back to you" answers, not the lowest first-month price.

Where Mays fits

Mays isn't a POS. It runs the rest of the shift (the schedule, the time clock, checklists, temperature logs, training, team chat and inventory) and reads your sales from your POS. With Square, Clover or Union POS connected:

• Labor next to sales. Insights → Labor Cost compares staffing with sales hour by hour, so you can see whether the schedule matches the rush. See Labor cost insights.
• A forecast from your own history. Scheduling → Forecast projects each day's sales from your POS history, and with a weekly labor budget set, Mays tells you when the schedule goes over it. See Sales forecast and labor budget.
• A task for every Square or Clover refund. Connecting Square or Clover turns on an automation that creates a task for whoever is on shift to write down why a refund was issued.
• Inventory that follows sales. With Inventory in your plan, POS sales can take ingredients out of stock. See POS mapping and automatic depletion.

If you've already chosen Toast or another POS, Mays can still run your schedule, time clock and checklists, but it won't read your sales automatically. Our post on how many apps a new restaurant needs shows what the rest of the stack looks like.

Pick the POS last, not first

Write down how your café sells, ask every vendor the same questions, and compare the answers in one table. It's an afternoon of work that saves you from a multi-year contract with the wrong system.

Start your free trial: 30 days, every module, no card needed. Want to see how Mays reads your Square, Clover or Union sales? Book a walkthrough.