Restaurant POS systems for UK independents: till, QR and kitchen display

Built for UK restaurant service: coursing and fire commands, uneven bill splits, table moves, allergen modifiers on the pass, plus QR ordering and kitchen display in one queue. From £89/month on devices you already own. For market-wide EPOS costs and types, see the EPOS systems guide. For cloud architecture basics, see the cloud POS guide. To compare providers side by side, use the 2026 restaurant POS comparison.

One system, front to back

Most restaurant problems at the pass come from disconnected tools: a till here, an ordering app there, a printer that jams. Servio runs the whole flow as one platform. Orders from the counter till, QR table ordering and staff devices all land in the same queue and route to the right kitchen station, while analytics show you what sold and what did not. It runs in the browser on tablets you already own, so there is no proprietary till to buy or maintain.

Why independents choose it

Published pricing. £89 Starter, £219 Growth, Enterprise from £449, with no quote wall. No hardware. Your own devices; a dropped tablet costs a screen, not your data. No contract. Month-to-month, cancel anytime. Live the same afternoon. We import your menu from a file or URL. Fair payments. Card payments run through Stripe at Stripe's published rates with no markup. See how the whole market compares in our 2026 restaurant POS comparison, or the cost breakdown in the UK cost guide and how we calculate every figure.

What a restaurant service actually demands

A restaurant till is judged on the awkward moments, not the easy ones. A table orders starters now and mains "in a bit", so the kitchen needs coursing and a fire command rather than one dump of tickets. Six friends split a bill unevenly and two of them pay by card while one pays cash. A couple move from the bar to a table and expect their drinks to move with them. Someone asks whether the sauce contains nuts, and the answer has to be on the screen rather than in a folder behind the pass.

Servio handles these as ordinary parts of service. Items can be held and fired by course, bills split by item or by amount with part payments in any mix, tables transferred or merged without re-keying anything, and modifiers carry allergen notes through to the kitchen display so the information travels with the dish. Stock control runs against the same menu, so counts move as items sell rather than at the end of the week. Table booking and table management sit on the Growth plan for venues running a full floor.

A Saturday service, from door to close

The clearest way to judge a restaurant POS is to walk one busy evening through it and see where the friction lands.

18:00 - the floor fills

Bookings and walk-ins go onto the same floor plan, so the host is not reconciling a paper diary against what they can see. Two tables merge for a party of six and the covers move with them rather than becoming a fresh ticket the kitchen has to interpret.

19:30 - the rush

Servers take orders at the table on a phone, so the order reaches the pass in seconds rather than after a walk to the terminal, and nobody is retyping handwriting. Guests on other tables order and pay by QR at the same time, and those orders join the same queue in the same order they arrived - not a second stream the kitchen has to merge in its head. Starters route to one station and mains to another, so the pass sees one coherent ticket instead of a printer spooling everything at once.

20:10 - the awkward bits

A table wants to split the bill four ways with two people paying by card and one adding a tip. A dish comes back. A member of staff voids a £42 line. All three are ordinary Saturday events, and all three are where a weak system costs you money: split payments that force a manual workaround, refunds that lose the audit trail, voids nobody can attribute later. Every change is recorded against the account that made it, so a Sunday morning review takes minutes rather than reconstructing an evening from memory.

22:40 - close

Takings, covers, average spend and what actually sold are already there. Cashing up is a check, not an exercise in arithmetic, and the owner can see the same numbers from home.

What a restaurant needs that a retail till does not

Plenty of POS systems sold to UK restaurants are retail systems with a hospitality skin, and the gaps show up in the same four places.

Courses and timing. A restaurant does not sell a basket, it sells a sequence. Starters fire, mains hold, and the pass decides when. A retail till has no concept of holding half an order.

Modifiers that mean something. Not just “no onions”, but modifiers that change the price, the prep station and the allergen information, and that carry through to the kitchen rather than being lost in a note field.

Allergens travelling with the dish. Since Natasha’s Law, allergen information is not a laminated card at the door, and the safest place for it is attached to the item all the way to the pass. A system where the allergen note lives in free text is a system where it eventually gets missed.

Tables and covers as first-class objects. Splitting, merging, moving a party and tracking covers per table are how a restaurant thinks. Anything that treats a table as a customer name attached to a basket will fight you every service.

Sizing it for your venue

A twenty-cover bistro and a hundred-cover restaurant with a bar need different things, and the honest answer is not always the bigger plan.

Small full-service, one room. Counter, QR ordering and a single kitchen screen usually cover it. Starter at £89/month does that on devices you already own.

Busy full-service with a floor and a bar. Multi-station routing, table management and inventory start earning their keep the moment two prep areas are working the same ticket. That is Growth.

More than one site. Growth covers one venue and can add up to two more at £99/month each. Central menus and cross-venue reporting across a group sit on Enterprise. If you are running two sites off two unconnected tills today, the reporting alone is usually the reason to move.

Whatever the size, judge it on the all-in monthly figure at your own card volume rather than the software price, and check the working on our cost methodology page.

The hour before doors

A restaurant POS is judged on Saturday, but it is set up on Thursday. Import the menu and walk it on a phone. Assign kitchen stations so a new category is not routed nowhere. Connect Stripe and run one live 10p charge. Print one QR, not a hundred. Create staff accounts before the shift. The written versions of those steps are in the going-live, menu import and Stripe articles.

Allergen notes belong on the item, not in a folder. A modifier that changes the allergen profile has to reach the pass. If a ticket never appears on the kitchen display, reload the screen, then check routing; the pass can work from the order list on any device signed in as kitchen. That mid-service path is in orders not reaching the kitchen.

Switching from a kit you already paid for

Plenty of independents already own Square readers. Growth can connect those readers as a switch aid so you are not binning kit on day one. That is a switch aid, not a hardware partnership. Default card payments still settle through Stripe at Stripe’s published rates. Toast and other reader connections are coming the same way.

Cash to open on first-party till and kitchen kits, 23 August 2026: Square £1,687, Zettle £895, SumUp £549, Servio £0. All-in at £40,000 / £25, Servio Growth is £999. SumUp can land near £1,002 on that ticket. We publish that ranking because hiding it would be the cheaper marketing line. The 23 August note is cash to open versus all-in.

What changes when the till is cloud based

A traditional restaurant EPOS keeps the menu, the prices and the takings on a terminal in the building. That is why a hardware fault becomes a service problem, why a price change means walking to the till, and why seeing yesterday's numbers means being on site. A cloud POS moves all of it to the browser, so the same menu runs on every device and an owner can check a Saturday from home.

The practical difference for an independent is cost and recovery. There is no proprietary terminal to buy at roughly £1,100 for a counter and floor setup, no engineer visit when something fails, and a broken tablet costs the price of a tablet rather than a day of trading. Servio runs on the devices a venue already owns, updates itself, and keeps serving through short internet drops, re-syncing when the connection returns. The full picture is in our EPOS systems guide.

Common questions