What does a till system for a restaurant cost?

Why nobody can quote you a single figure

Ask three suppliers what a till system costs and you get three numbers you cannot lay side by side. The first quotes the monthly software fee. The second quotes the hardware in his showroom. The third quotes a package price that neatly excludes the payment fees.

None of the three is lying. A till system is not a product with a price tag, it is a stack of costs spread over five years. Six lines, to be precise:

• Hardware you buy or lease: screens, receipt printers, a cash drawer, card terminals.
• A software subscription, usually per till per month rather than per restaurant.
• Payment fees on every transaction that comes in, at the counter and online.
• Installation, entering your menu and training your team.
• Integrations with your bookkeeping, your ordering site and your rota software.
• Maintenance, support and the annual increase across the whole term.

Compare on one of those six lines and you compare nothing. The quote with the lowest monthly figure is regularly the dearest, because the other five fill up. Put all six in one row per supplier and total them out to sixty months. That is the number you decide on.

Cloud, local or hybrid: the same money at a different moment

The first thing that sets your cost is not the supplier but the shape. The same functionality costs a lot up front and little afterwards, or the other way round. You do not see that in your margin, you see it in your bank balance in month one.

Cloud is not cheaper than local. Cloud is later. Over five years they often land in the same place, with this difference: a subscription usually includes updates, backups and support.

Which shape is cheapest depends on where you stand. If your restaurant is under a year old, the low bar to entry outweighs the final total: you need the money now, not in year four. After ten years on the same corner, only that final total counts.

Hardware: what you pay once

Hardware is the only cost line with real figures on it, and even those are ranges. Till equipment is a global market: a receipt printer costs about the same in Rotterdam as in Antwerp. The figures below are orders of magnitude for a budget, not a quote.

Two decisions save the most money. The first is not buying more than you need: a second till pays for itself only if there is genuinely a queue at the first. Start with the smallest set-up that survives your busiest hour.

The second is buying against leasing. Leasing keeps your first invoice low and your monthly charge high, and after five years you hold nothing. Buying does the opposite and you write the equipment down over several years. With any lease proposal, ask who owns the kit at the end, and who replaces a broken screen.

Software: the monthly fee is per till

The monthly figure on the website applies per till, not per restaurant. Two screens behind the bar and a handheld for the terrace are three times that figure. It is the most common misunderstanding in the whole quote.

The figures run from a few tens of euros per till per month to well over a hundred. That gap is rarely about taking payment, because every system does that. It sits in the modules: stock, scheduling, detailed reporting, an integration with your ordering site. The entry price on the pricing page is usually one till with no modules.

That last question matters most and gets asked least. An increase of a few per cent sounds like nothing, but it compounds across the whole term and every till at once. Have the answer written into the quote, and ask whether it is capped.

Payment fees: this is where the Netherlands really differs

Almost everything you read online about till costs comes from the United States, and this is where it goes wrong. There a card payment is charged as a percentage of the bill plus a few cents. Here the debit card is the norm, charged per transaction at a fixed fee of a few cents.

That inverts your maths. With a fixed fee per transaction, a bill of €8 costs the same as one of €80, so proportionally you pay most on small orders. With a percentage it is the reverse. Run it with your own tariffs: on a €25 bill, 2% costs you €0.50, a fixed fee of five cents costs five cents.

Your payment costs are also made of more than one line:

• Debit card payments, contactless or inserted: usually a fixed fee per transaction.
• Credit cards: usually a percentage, higher for business cards and cards from outside Europe.
• iDEAL and other online payments on your ordering site: usually a fixed fee per payment.
• The card terminal itself: monthly rental or a one-off purchase.
• A fixed monthly fee for the contract with your payment provider.

So never ask about the transaction fee in the singular. Ask for the tariff sheet per card type and per payment method, and whether you are free to place your payment processing where you like. Some suppliers charge a low monthly fee because they make their money on your payments.

Installation, training and the week afterwards

Between signing and your first smooth Friday night sits work, and it is not always in the price. Entering your menu is the biggest part: every variant, every extra, the right VAT rate per item, because food falls under 9% and alcohol under 21%. On eighty dishes that is a day of work, and the only question is whose.

• On-site installation, with an engineer who runs the network and sets up the tills.
• Remote installation, where you do it yourself with somebody on the phone.
• Entering your menu, including variants, extras and the VAT rate per item.
• Training your team, from instruction videos to half a day in your restaurant.

Remote is cheaper and for a small place often enough. With several tills, a kitchen display and a network that is not yet in the walls, an engineer is worth the money, if only because you have somebody to point at.

And then the cost on no quote at all: the week in which your team works more slowly. Plan the switch for your quietest day, never a Friday, and roster an extra pair of hands for the first two services whose only job is to watch. That costs a few hours of wages and saves an evening of unhappy guests.

The costs that surface in year two

The first invoice is the most honest one you get. After that come the lines that never came up in the sales talk.

Support and maintenance

Support during office hours is usually included. Support at half past seven on a Saturday evening often is not, which is exactly when you need it. Ask about the response time outside office hours, and who turns up when hardware breaks.

Integrations

An integration with your bookkeeping, your ordering site or a delivery platform is sometimes billed separately, per integration per month. Ask which sit inside the tariff and which run through a middleman, because that middleman has its own invoice and its own outages.

Security and data

You handle card data and guest data. Card payments carry the requirements of the card schemes, guest data the GDPR. With a cloud system most of that sits inside the service. Run it yourself and it is your work, and your cost.

Growing

A second site is not a second subscription but a second complete set: tills, licences, installation, training. Ask now what that costs. The answer tells you whether this system grows with you or holds you back.

Set it against what an order costs elsewhere

A till system costs a fixed amount per month. That is dull, and dull is why it stays manageable: in January you know what December will cost. A delivery platform costs a share of every order, and that bill grows with your success.

Run it once with your own numbers. Say €18,000 of orders come in through a platform in a month. At a commission of 10% that is €1,800 in that month. Put your own percentage in, because that lives in your contract, not in this article. Set the result next to the monthly figure for your till.

This is not an argument for leaving the platforms tomorrow. They bring guests you would not have seen. The point is knowing your cost per channel. An order through your own site costs you the payment fee and nothing more. The same order through a platform costs a percentage, including from the guest who has ordered twenty times.

So work out not what your till costs, but what an order costs, channel by channel.

Do the maths before you sign

It all fits in one table with a column per supplier and sixty months underneath. That is homework, and the last moment at which you can still change anything.

1. Ask every supplier for a quote carrying all six cost lines, including the zeros.
2. Total up month one: hardware, installation, entering your menu, training.
3. Total the fixed monthly charge, multiply by sixty, and add the annual increase.
4. Add your payment fees, based on last month’s transaction count.
5. Subtract what you save: the tablet that can go, the hours you stop retyping.

Only then negotiate. There is little movement in the monthly figure, because that is what the salesperson is measured on. In the rest there is: installation, entering your menu, a hardware bundle, the first months, or a shorter term at the same rate. The worst answer is no.

Do this on Monday: take the most recent quote on your desk and find the six cost lines. If one is missing, ring about that before you talk about price.