POS systems for bars: how to compare them in the UK

There are dozens of pos systems for bars and most demos look identical. This guide is about the questions that separate them, starting with two legal details that decide the shortlist before any feature does.

It does not rank products. Anyone claiming to know the best pos systems for bars without knowing your room, your licence and your food offer is guessing.

The tips question, which is now law

Since the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 came into force, employers must allocate qualifying tips, gratuities and service charges fairly among workers at the place of business.

That has a direct consequence for your software. Ask each supplier:

• Does it record tips separately from sales, by member of staff and by shift?
• Can it produce a report showing what was collected and how it was allocated?
• Does it distinguish card tips from cash tips, and service charge from a voluntary tip?

A system that lumps tips into takings makes fair allocation a manual job on a phone calculator at one in the morning. That is a real cost, and it is one nobody mentions in a demo.

The VAT question, which is not one rate

A bar with food sells things that do not all carry the same VAT treatment. The government publishes the VAT rates and the categories, and the point for your system is simple: it must let you set the correct rate per item, not per sale.

Ask to see an order containing a drink, a hot meal and a packaged item, and look at how the VAT breaks out on the receipt and in the report. If the answer is one rate applied to the whole ticket, keep looking.

Then the ordinary bar questions

With those two settled, the rest are the mechanics of a busy room:

• Named or numbered tabs that survive a shift change
• Tab transfer between staff, and between the counter and a table
• A card held on pre-authorisation behind the bar
• Quick buttons for the drinks that carry most of the night
• Prices that change on a clock when happy hour ends
• Splits that work by item, by seat and evenly

Do not accept a description of any of these. Ask to see a tab move from one member of staff to another during the demo.

Where the food side goes wrong

Most point of sale systems for bars are strong on drinks and weak on food, and a venue serving both feels that every night.

"Every bar system we are shown is fast at the tab. Not one of them can tell the owner which regular stopped coming in, or take an order from the table by the window."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

A pos system for bar and restaurant service does not fix that by adding a food module, because the problem is not at the counter at all. It is that a table cannot order without catching somebody's eye.

That part is a separate layer, running beside your counter system, needing no hardware:

• An ordering page under your name, with 12 page layouts to choose from so the menu reads as you intend, not as a template decides.
• A menu edited by you, not a vendor: options and add-ons carry their own prices, and required choices are enforced so the kitchen can trust the ticket.
• Priced at the moment of checkout, every line, from the menu as it is now rather than as it was when the page opened.
• Messages nobody types. A confirmation to the customer the moment they order, a ticket to the kitchen, and for delivery a link with the GPS pin dropped at checkout: 3 messages in about 2 seconds.
• The stock counts down by itself on items and on options, and a dish at zero disappears before anyone can order it.
• Regulars collect stamps and climb tiers, each tier with its own automatic discount, and the card sits in the phone's wallet through Google's loyalty card format rather than in an app.
• Invoices carrying your registration number, as PDFs, which the customer downloads without creating anything.
• A designer for the table QR, so what the guest scans looks like the restaurant and not like a parking meter.
• The table is the address. The code knows which table it is, so nothing else has to be typed.
• Colours and logo picked in the designer, so the wallet card is unmistakably yours and keeps itself current.
• Bundles, upsells and coupons that respect caps, exclusions and expiry, with no chance of two automatic discounts at once.

Licensed drinks usually stay with your staff, which most venues prefer anyway. Moving the food off the floor team is where the time comes back.

Stock, and the second site

Two more questions worth asking before the price conversation.

Stock. A bar's stock is measured in pours, not units, and systems differ wildly in whether they can express that. Ask how a bottle becomes a number of servings, what happens to the last uneven measure, and whether the count falls as drinks are rung up or only when somebody does a stocktake. If it is only at stocktake, you will find out about a discrepancy weeks after it happened.

The second site. Even if you have one bar today, ask what a second one costs and what it looks like. Does each site keep its own menu and its own opening hours? Can a manager at one site see the other site's numbers, and can you turn that off? Systems that were built for one venue tend to reveal it here, and moving again later is the expensive option.

What it costs, and what to ask

Ask for a two year total with every module you will actually use switched on, including card processing, support tier and any integration fees. Ask what leaving in month 14 of a 36 month term costs. Ask who owns the data and how you export it.

Our own pricing is on the pricing page rather than in this article, and the trial runs 15 days with no card. Payment stays with you: cash or your own card machine. There are no online payments in the system, so no card details sit in it, and old order details are cleared automatically after 120 days.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best POS systems for bars?

There is no single answer, and any article claiming one is selling something. Judge on tab transfer, tips reporting, per-item VAT, split behaviour and the two year total, then shortlist from what survives.

Is Get Menu a bar POS?

No. It does not open a tab, drive a drawer or a card terminal, or do your end of day. It is the ordering, menu, stock and loyalty layer beside the system you already run.

Can guests order drinks from a QR code?

Technically yes, and many venues choose not to, because licensed service usually needs a member of staff to see the guest. Food and soft drinks through the code is the common pattern.

How does the tips law affect which system I buy?

It makes tip recording and reporting a requirement rather than a nice extra. Ask to see the report before you sign.

How do customers pay?

At your counter or your table, in cash or on your own card machine, exactly as they do now.