How to choose a restaurant POS system in Palestine

The short answer: choose a system that keeps working when the internet drops, knows about tables and not just invoices, gets the order to the kitchen without paper, splits the bill, supports Arabic, the shekel and VAT, and is priced by what you actually use. The rest is detail.

Why a shop POS is not enough

In a shop the sale starts and ends at the till within a minute. In a restaurant a bill opens on a table and stays open for an hour, gets added to two or three times, is spread across the grill, the bar and desserts, and is then split four ways. A retail system has no idea what a “table”, a “station” or a “seat” is, so the cashier uses it while the floor and the kitchen stay on paper. We covered that difference in how restaurant POS differs from retail.

The seven criteria

1. Does it work offline?

Here this is the first question, not the last. A dropped line on a Thursday evening means a full room and a frozen system. Ask specifically: do the waiter devices and the kitchen display carry on too, or only the till? A good system links devices to each other over the venue’s local network and needs the internet only to sync. More in offline POS in Palestine.

2. Does it know the floor?

A table plan with areas, each table’s state (available, occupied, bill requested, waiting to be cleaned), guest count, moving a table and merging two. If the system calls a table a “customer” or “a note on the invoice”, it is not a restaurant system.

3. How does the order reach the kitchen?

The best path: the waiter enters the order once, at the table; it appears only on the screen of the station concerned; the cook marks it ready and the waiter knows. Check item-to-station routing: does the juice go to the bar and the grill items to the grill automatically?

4. Item options

“No onion”, “large”, “medium rare”. If these are typed as free notes they get lost, or their price is forgotten. You want option groups you define: required or optional, with a minimum and maximum, and a price difference added automatically.

5. The bill the way guests ask for it

Split by items, by seat or by amount; more than one payment method per bill; a service charge applied to dine-in but not takeaway; and tips that do not get mixed into revenue.

6. Control

Who gave the discount? Who cancelled an item after it went to the kitchen, and why? Ask for a discount ceiling per employee, manager approval above it, and a recorded reason for every cancellation. That is the difference between “I feel something is leaking” and “I know where”.

7. Price, and how it is counted

Some systems count every waiter phone and every kitchen screen as a paid device, so the price multiplies as the restaurant grows. Ask: what exactly is counted?

A quick comparison

Questions to put to the vendor

1. Show me what happens when I unplug the internet right now — on the waiter device, not the till.
2. What do I pay if I add three waiters and two kitchen screens?
3. Can my data be exported in a format I can move?
4. Are bills posted to real accounting, or only to a sales report?
5. Who supports me on a Friday evening, and in which language?

Where Sahl stands

Sahl’s restaurant module is built on these criteria: a floor plan, a kitchen display per station, waiter devices on the local network that work offline and do not count as extra POS terminals, item options, three ways to split a bill, service charge and tips in their own accounts, and discount ceilings with manager approval. It is switched on free with any plan that includes the point of sale. Try it in your restaurant before you decide.