5 IMPORTANT Questions to Ask Before Choosing an EPOS System

You sit through the demo. Everything works. The rep answers your questions, the till looks slick, and the price seems fair enough. So you sign.

Six weeks later, the kitchen screen doesn't talk to the delivery platform your customers actually use. The offline mode you were promised turns out to mean "call our support line." And the transaction fee on your first invoice is nothing like the number you were quoted.

None of this makes you careless. It happens because most EPOS demos are built to show off features, not to answer the questions that decide whether a system holds up on your busiest Saturday night.

Here are the five questions worth asking before choosing an EPOS system, whichever provider is sitting across the table.

Will it actually talk to what you already run?

Ask this before anything else: does the EPOS you're looking at connect natively to your kitchen display, your delivery platforms and your payment terminal, or does it need a third-party workaround that someone has to maintain? A closer look at what a struggling setup actually costs you is worth reading if any of this already sounds familiar.

A system that only "integrates" through a bridge adds a point of failure to every busy shift. If an order from a delivery app has to pass through two separate pieces of software before it reaches the kitchen, a five-second delay on a quiet Tuesday becomes a ten-minute pile-up on a Friday night.

Kayana's EPOS system links directly to its own kitchen display system — the same shift away from paper tickets we've covered before — plus self-service kiosks and card payments, so an order placed anywhere in the building appears on the same screen the kitchen is already watching, with nothing re-typed by hand. Ask any provider to show you the integration live, not describe it on a slide.

What happens the moment your Wi-Fi drops?

Nearly every provider claims offline mode. Few will show it to you. Ask them to unplug the router mid-demo. What happens to a card payment that's already in progress? Does order data sync automatically once you're back online, or does someone have to reconcile it by hand at midnight?

Kayana's EPOS keeps taking orders and payments when the connection drops, then syncs everything automatically the moment it's back, so a five-minute broadband wobble during a Friday rush doesn't turn into a queue at the till.

The real cost of choosing the wrong EPOS system

The sticker price on an EPOS quote rarely reflects what you'll actually pay. Ask three things before you sign anything: what's the real card processing rate, not the headline one. What happens if you want to leave within the first year. And is the hardware yours outright, or are you renting it indefinitely.

Kayana runs on one transparent rate with no hidden card fees and no leased hardware that outlives its usefulness, which is worth comparing line by line against anything else you're considering.

Can one system run site two, site ten, site fifty?

Even if you're only opening one site right now, ask this anyway. Growth plans change faster than EPOS contracts allow for. Can menu and pricing changes be pushed to every location at once? Can you see reporting across all of them from a single login, or are you stuck comparing spreadsheets from five separate systems?

Kayana's merchant admin pushes menu and pricing changes to every site from one login, so a second location doesn't mean learning a second piece of software.

Who picks up the phone at 8pm on a Saturday?

Ask about support hours directly. Is it 24/7, or business hours with a ticket queue overnight? Ask who owns the fix when something breaks, too. A provider who blames "the hardware" or "the payment processor" the moment something goes wrong is not a provider you want mid-service.

Kayana operators report measurable results within weeks of going live, including 32% faster ordering for Shah's Halal Food and 60 to 90 second service for Plan Burrito, changes that came with round-the-clock support built in as standard, not sold as an add-on.

None of these five questions are about the shiniest screen or the longest feature list. They're about whether the system disappears into the background of a normal shift, doing its job quietly, or becomes one more thing your team has to work around. Ask them before you sign, not after.