Restaurant POS and Payments: Why Using One Platform Matters

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Should your POS and payments run on the same platform?

Yes, if you can. Put your restaurant POS and payment processing on one platform and you get one set of transaction data, one bill and one support line. Split them and you get two of each.

Plenty of restaurants run a POS from one company and a card terminal from another. It works. But every sale passes through two systems, and when a payment goes wrong, each provider blames the other.

What splitting POS and payments costs you

Fees

Card processors take a percentage of every transaction, plus a fixed fee per transaction. A small difference in rate doesn't look like much until you multiply it by a few hundred transactions a day.

Say a restaurant takes £10,000 a week on card. At 1.5% it pays £150 a week in processing fees. At 1.2% it pays £120. That's £30 a week, or £1,560 a year, from one site. A group with eight sites is looking at £12,480.

Reconciliation

With separate systems, end-of-day means matching the POS report against the payment provider's report. They often don't match, and working out why is slow, fiddly work. Somebody has to do it, usually at the end of a long shift.

On an integrated platform there's nothing to match. The order and the payment are the same transaction record.

Nobody owns the problem

A card payment fails, or a refund doesn't go through. The POS company says it's the terminal. The terminal company says it's the POS. The ticket goes back and forth and the problem sits there.

With one provider handling POS and payments, you make one call.

What integrated POS and payments looks like day to day

The order total goes straight from the POS to the card reader. Nobody types it in, so nobody types it in wrong, and the customer isn't standing there waiting while someone does.

Every payment is tied to its POS order, so the end-of-day report shows what you actually sold without anyone matching it up by hand. Refunds, voids and split bills sit in the same place as everything else.

Revenue, payment method breakdowns, average transaction value and refund rates are all in one dashboard. No exporting from two systems and stitching them together in a spreadsheet.

You'll often need fewer devices too. One device can take the order, take the payment and print the receipt. Fewer boxes on the counter means fewer things to break.

Why Flipdish combines POS and payments

Flipdish builds payments into its restaurant platform. POS, online ordering, kiosks and payments all run through one system.

For an operator, that means:

the same transaction data across every channel
reconciliation that happens on its own
one contract and one support team
no third-party payment processor to manage
pricing with no hidden fees

Restaurant groups across the UK and Ireland use Flipdish so they have fewer tech vendors to deal with.

When you might use separate providers

Some restaurants are tied into a contract with a payment processor they can't easily get out of. Others operate in a market where their preferred provider doesn't offer integrated POS payments yet.

If that's you, pick a POS that integrates properly with your payment processor, so the two systems at least share data instead of running side by side.

If you're choosing a new POS anyway, start with one that includes payments. It gets rid of a whole category of problems before you have them.

Questions to ask before choosing a restaurant POS and payments solution

What are the transaction fees, for both card-present and card-not-present payments?
How does end-of-day reconciliation work?
Can it take payments for in-store, online, kiosk and app orders from one platform?
What happens if a payment fails in the middle of service?
Is there one support contact for both POS and payment issues?

You can see how Flipdish handles each of these on one platform. If you're looking at your payment setup alongside your POS, speak to the Flipdish team.