Why Our Restaurant Customers Pick EPOS Now

There are plenty of good EPOS systems on the market. Square, Lightspeed, TouchBistro, Toast, Tevalis, ICRTouch. We have used or worked alongside most of them. So when we keep recommending EPOS Now for the kind of restaurant we typically work with, it is not because we get a kickback. It is because the product fits the way British hospitality sites actually run, and the support model holds up when the tills are red hot at 8pm on a Saturday.

Split bills that do not cause an argument

If you have ever watched a server try to split a bill six ways across two card machines and a couple of cash payments, you know how fast it can go wrong. EPOS Now handles split bills cleanly. By person, by item, by percentage, in any combination. Front of house staff pick it up in about ten minutes. We have stopped getting called out to fix end-of-night cash-up errors at sites that used to ring us twice a week.

Kitchen printers that do not eat tickets

A till that does not push a clean ticket to the kitchen is not a till, it is a problem. EPOS Now plays nicely with Epson and Star kitchen printers, and the printing engine is forgiving when the network has a wobble. Tickets queue rather than vanish. For sites with a real kitchen tempo, we wire kitchen printers on dedicated network drops back to the rack. EPOS Now does not blink.

Integrations that matter

The bits we use most:

• Card payments through Worldpay, Dojo, Stripe and SumUp
• Stock control with low-stock alerts and recipe-level cost tracking
• Xero and QuickBooks for daily Z-report sync
• Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat connectors so online orders drop into the kitchen alongside walk-in tickets
• Kitchen Brains and Quality Product Management on sites with serious kitchen pace

Not every restaurant uses every integration. The point is the platform plays well with the tools you already use.

Hardware that survives a kitchen

EPOS Now sells their own hardware. The terminals are built for hospitality use, with sealed touch surfaces that survive grease, beer spills and the occasional drop. The cash drawers are commercial grade. We have units we installed three or four years ago that are still on the original screens.

If you want to bring your own iPad-based setup, EPOS Now can do that too, but for a busy kitchen we always recommend the dedicated terminals. They take more abuse.

The downsides

We promised honesty. The trade-offs you should know about:

• It is a subscription. You pay monthly per terminal. For a single-site cafe that is fine. For a four-terminal restaurant it adds up over a five-year horizon.
• Some advanced reporting sits behind higher tiers. Read the price list before you sign.
• First-party support is solid but not 24/7 on every plan. That is part of why our customers like having us as the first call.
• Custom workflows that lean heavily on the API are possible, but not as flexible as more developer-focused systems like Square.

Why the support model matters

A restaurant manager once called us during the busiest lunch service of the week. The tills had locked up. We had an engineer on site within thirty minutes. The fix was a network switch that had silently stopped passing traffic on one port. Total time from call to working tills was about an hour. They lost the start of one service. They did not lose the rest of the day.

That is what we mean when we say a 4-hour SLA matters in hospitality. It is not the EPOS software that fails most often, it is something else on the network. Having one team that installed the cable, the Wi-Fi, the EPOS and the card terminals means the diagnosis is fast and the fix is faster.

Should you pick EPOS Now?

If you run an independent restaurant, a small chain, a cafe or a casual dining site, and you want a till that staff can learn quickly, plays well with kitchen printers, splits bills cleanly and integrates with the tools you already use, EPOS Now is a solid pick. We will install it, train your team, wire it back into a tidy rack, and pick up the phone when something goes sideways.