What is Point of sale (POS)?

A point of sale is where a customer pays, and a POS system is the software and hardware that handles it. At minimum it lists products and prices, calculates tax, takes payment by card, cash or other tender, and prints or emails a receipt. Modern POS software runs on tablets, phones, PCs and Macs and connects to receipt printers, barcode scanners, cash drawers, payment terminals and kitchen screens.

What makes a POS valuable is what happens behind the sale. Each transaction updates inventory, records sales by item, employee and hour, and feeds reports such as the end-of-day Z-report. Restaurant POS systems add table maps, modifiers, coursing, split bills and kitchen routing. Retail POS systems focus on barcodes, variants like size and colour, lot and expiry tracking, and purchase orders. Both increasingly include online ordering and loyalty.

When choosing a POS, look at offline mode (can you keep selling if the internet drops?), hardware lock-in, payment processing terms, and how sales reach your accounting. A POS that posts sales, tax and payments straight into the ledger saves the daily re-keying and reconciliation that comes from exporting summaries into a separate bookkeeping system. In Canada, check that it handles GST, HST, PST and QST correctly for each province you sell in.