A restaurant counter has pressures a retail till never deals with — orders split across tables, modifications shouted mid-rush, and a kitchen that needs the order before the customer even finishes talking. A generic POS built for retail misses most of this.
Order tracking by table, not just by transaction
Retail POS systems process one transaction at a time. A restaurant needs to track multiple open orders simultaneously, each tied to a table or a takeaway ticket, often modified several times before payment.
Fast, reliable splitting and modifiers
Splitting a bill three ways, adding "no onions," or upgrading a side — these small, constant adjustments need to be fast, since a slow interface here directly shows up as a longer wait for a table full of customers.
A way to get orders to the kitchen quickly
Whether it's a printed kitchen ticket or a simple item list read from a tablet at the pass, the order needs to reach the kitchen accurately and fast — this is arguably the single most operationally critical feature for a restaurant specifically.
Inventory tied to recipes, not just finished products
A restaurant's real inventory challenge is tracking ingredients consumed per dish, not just counting finished units sold — a POS that only tracks "burgers sold" without connecting to ingredient usage misses half the picture for cost control.
Staff shift and tip tracking, if relevant
For businesses where tips are pooled or tracked per staff member, having this built into the same system avoids a separate manual process layered on top of the POS.