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How to choose a POS system for a restaurant

Settle three things first, who processes your cards, what your country demands of the till, and what keeps working offline, and most of the market disqualifies itself.

By Thinking Desk 6 min read

Key takeaways

  • The card processing rate usually costs more than the software, so compare one total number over 36 months.
  • Check the legal requirement per country first, because it disqualifies products: Belgium needs a registered cash system, Germany a certified TSE, Luxembourg none at all.
  • Ask the vendor to pull the router out during the demo and show you what still works.
  • Count licences, not tills: some vendors charge a licence for every kitchen display screen.
  • Agree the exit before the entry, including the data export format and the contract notice period.
On this page
  1. How to choose a POS system for a restaurant: the short version
  2. Step 1: work out the real monthly cost, not the headline price
  3. Step 2: check what the law wants from your till, country by country
  4. Step 3: decide what has to keep working when the line drops
  5. Step 4: count your screens, your staff and their languages
  6. Step 5: ask for the exit before you sign the entry
  7. The demo script: eight questions worth asking
  8. Red flags
  9. What to do next

How to choose a POS system for a restaurant: the short version

Decide three things before you book a single demo: who processes your cards, what your country's law demands of the till, and what has to keep working when the internet dies. Those three answers eliminate most of the market in an afternoon. Everything else, the colour of the buttons, the number of reports, the AI assistant, is preference, and preference is what salespeople sell you when the three hard questions have no good answer.

Step 1: work out the real monthly cost, not the headline price

The subscription is rarely the big number. Take a 60 cover restaurant with an average ticket of 28 euros, open 26 days a month, where 70 percent of guests pay by card. That is about 43 700 euros of turnover and roughly 30 600 euros of it on cards, spread over about 1 090 card transactions.

  • At 1.65 percent with no fixed fee, which is what Square charges on in person EEA cards in France, you pay about 505 euros a month in card fees.
  • At 2.9 percent plus 25 cents per transaction, which is what LUXPOS publishes for EEA consumer cards, you pay about 1 160 euros.

The gap is 655 euros a month. No software subscription in this market is worth that much, which means the processing rate is the most expensive decision you will make, and it is the one most vendors will not publish. Build your comparison as a single number: licences per till, plus a licence or a fee per kitchen screen, plus each module you actually need, plus the card rate applied to your real card turnover, plus hardware, over 36 months.

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Step 2: check what the law wants from your till, country by country

This is the step that disqualifies products, so do it before you fall in love with one.

Country What the till has to satisfy
Luxembourg No certification exists. Deletions and changes must remain traceable to the original transaction, cash entries at least daily, payment methods grouped into the daily totals, ten year retention, and a FAIA 2.01 audit file on request
Belgium Above 25 000 euros a year of meals consumed on the premises, a registered cash system with an FDM black box. A newly opened establishment must start on GKS 2.0 from 1 July 2026
Germany A certified TSE under paragraph 146a of the Abgabenordnung, a receipt issued in immediate connection with every sale, and notification of each system to the Finanzamt within a month of purchase
France A certificate from an accredited body, NF525 or LNE, with a penalty of 7 500 euros per non compliant software
Netherlands No certification requirement on the Belastingdienst administration page, but an auditable administration kept for seven years

Two practical consequences. If you are in Belgium, the certificate number is a yes or no gate, and only some vendors publish one. If you are in Luxembourg, nobody can sell you a certified till because no such certificate exists, so judge the system on the traceability, the daily VAT and payment method split, and the FAIA export instead. We set out the detail in does Luxembourg require a certified cash register.

Step 3: decide what has to keep working when the line drops

Ask the vendor to write down what still works without internet, then test it. In a demo, pull the network cable or switch off the router and try to take an order, fire it to the kitchen, split a bill and settle it. Vendors split into three groups.

  • Systems that keep taking card payments offline, with a cap and an upload window.
  • Systems that keep the whole floor flow but stop at integrated card payments, so you can still serve and still take cash.
  • Systems that stop, because they are browser based and online only.

None of those three is wrong in itself. What is wrong is buying the third kind for a restaurant on a rural line, or paying for the first kind when your village has fibre and your guests pay cash.

Step 4: count your screens, your staff and their languages

Two cost traps live here. The first is the licence per screen: some vendors treat a kitchen display as another licence, so two tills and one kitchen screen is three licences, not two. The second is the per order or per cover fee on table ordering, which turns a busy terrace into a variable cost.

Then count the languages your team actually reads. In a Luxembourg kitchen that often means Portuguese in the back and French on the floor, with German speaking guests at the table. A till that offers French, English and Spanish is a training problem you will pay for every time you hire.

Step 5: ask for the exit before you sign the entry

The question nobody asks in a demo is how you leave. Get four things in writing: the contract length and the notice period, whether the price can be indexed and by how much, whether you own the hardware or are leasing it, and in what format you can export your products, your sales history and your customer file. A system that cannot hand you a CSV of your own transactions is a system that owns your business.

The demo script: eight questions worth asking

  1. What is your card processing rate on an ordinary consumer card issued in this country, including the fixed fee per transaction?
  2. Is the subscription per till, per location or per account, and what does a second till cost?
  3. Is a kitchen display screen included, or does it consume a licence?
  4. Does table ordering cost anything per order or per cover?
  5. Show me a daily close that separates revenue by VAT rate and by payment method.
  6. Can you export a FAIA 2.01 file, or in Germany a DSFinV-K export, and can I see one now?
  7. If a cashier deletes a line, where does the original transaction remain visible?
  8. Pull the router out, and show me what still works.

If a vendor answers all eight in writing, you are dealing with a serious company regardless of the price. If three of the answers are "we will come back to you", the price is not the real risk.

Red flags

Any claim that a product is "certified for Luxembourg", because that certificate does not exist. A pricing page with no prices. A card rate that only appears after a sales call. An offline promise made verbally and absent from every page of the website. An NF525 claim without a certificate number, an issuing body and a date. And a reference customer list where nobody is the same size as you.

What to do next

Shortlist three systems, no more, and run the eight questions against all three on the same day so the answers are comparable. For a Luxembourg counter, the ranked field is in the best POS systems for Luxembourg. For a dining room in Luxembourg, Belgium or the Netherlands, start from the best restaurant POS for the Benelux, and if you are weighing a Belgian GKS system against a German TSE one, Lightspeed versus orderbird is the head to head. If you sell a POS system and we have a fact wrong, get listed and we will correct it.

Disclosure: Thinking is published by TTA Technologies, which also builds LUXPOS. We used LUXPOS's own published card rate in the worked example above precisely because it is the less flattering of the two numbers.

Questions and answers

How much should a restaurant POS cost per month?
Published prices in Luxembourg and the Benelux run from zero, on free tiers from SumUp and Hiboutik, to 59 EUR for LUXPOS Register, 89 EUR for one Lightspeed licence and 99.90 EUR for orderbird PRO S. A realistic independent with two tills, a kitchen screen and delivery ordering lands between 240 and 250 EUR a month, before card fees.
What is the most expensive mistake when choosing a POS?
Ignoring the card processing rate. On 30 000 EUR of monthly card turnover, the difference between 1.65 percent and 2.9 percent plus 25 cents per transaction is roughly 655 EUR a month, which is more than any subscription in this market.
Do I need a certified POS for my restaurant?
It depends entirely on the country. Belgium requires a registered cash system with an FDM black box above 25 000 EUR of on premise meals, Germany requires a certified TSE, France requires a certificate from an accredited body, and Luxembourg and the Netherlands require no certification at all, only auditable and non alterable records.

Sources

Every price and fact above was checked against these pages on the date shown.

  1. [1] Square nos frais, 1.65 percent on in person EEA cards accessed 2026-11-11
  2. [2] LUXPOS fee calculator, 2.9 percent plus 0.25 EUR on EEA consumer cards accessed 2026-11-11
  3. [3] LUXPOS pricing accessed 2026-11-11
  4. [4] Lightspeed Restaurant prijzen, licence ladder and kitchen screen as a licence accessed 2026-11-11
  5. [5] orderbird pricing, add-ons per month accessed 2026-11-11
  6. [6] Circulaire L.G.-A n° 63, obligations comptables en matière fiscale (Luxembourg) accessed 2026-11-11
  7. [7] FAIA 2.01, fichier d’audit informatisé (AED) accessed 2026-11-11
  8. [8] GKS 2.0 verplicht vanaf 1 juli 2026 (FOD Financiën) accessed 2026-11-11
  9. [9] Witte kassa and the 25 000 euro threshold accessed 2026-11-11
  10. [10] Paragraph 146a Abgabenordnung accessed 2026-11-11
  11. [11] Obligation de détenir un logiciel de caisse certifié (impots.gouv.fr) accessed 2026-11-11
  12. [12] Administratie bijhouden, zeven jaar bewaarplicht (Belastingdienst) accessed 2026-11-11
Topics posrestaurantguideluxembourgbenelux

Thinking is published by TTA Technologies in Luxembourg, which also builds LUXPOS, Salonify, BoxBee and DepotGest. Read the full disclosure policy