Restaurant POS software: what you actually need, and what you can skip.

A point of sale is a job, not a machine. You can do the job on the phone already in your pocket.

"POS" means the place a sale is completed. For decades that place was a physical terminal, so the word came to mean the box. It does not have to. Everything the box used to do — take the order, route it to the kitchen, total it, tax it, settle it, record it — is software, and software runs on whatever you already own.

What a restaurant point of sale system has to do

Front of house, kitchen, and back office. A product that is strong in one and absent in another will show it on your second busy Saturday.

• Front of house. Hold an open order against a table through a long sitting; add to it, split it between payers, merge two tables, and transfer an order from one to another — all before the bill is closed.
• Kitchen. The order reaches the kitchen the moment it is taken, as a live ticket that moves stage by stage as the food does, rather than a printed slip that is already out of date.
• Order types. Dine-in, takeaway and delivery need distinct treatment, because the tax and the charges differ by how the order leaves the building, not by what is in it.
• Tax, correctly, on every bill. Tax Invoice and Bill of Supply formats, the right CGST and SGST split, a single unbroken invoice series, and HSN where it applies.
• Permissions. The person taking the order is not the person closing the till. Each role should see only what its job needs.
• Stock that moves when dishes sell. Ingredient-level deduction in the units you actually buy in, with low-stock alerts, so the counter and the store agree at the end of the day.
• A close you can read. The day's sales, the order-type split and the tax summary as one export, not a chart to interpret at midnight.

Restaurant POS software, billing software, and a POS machine

Three words that get used as if they were one thing. The distinction matters because you can buy any one of them without the others, and only one of them is unavoidable.

1. Restaurant POS softwareThe counter itself: open orders against tables, kitchen tickets, order types, splits and transfers, settlement, and the day's close. This is the part you cannot skip.
2. Billing softwareThe document and the tax: a correct GST Tax Invoice or Bill of Supply, a sequential series, and the filing exports. In India this is not an add-on to the counter, it is part of it.
3. A POS machineHardware: a terminal, a cash drawer, a thermal printer, sometimes a card reader. Genuinely useful at high volume. Entirely optional otherwise, and the most common unnecessary purchase in this category.

If a vendor can only sell you the software bundled with their hardware, you are paying for the bundle whether or not you need the box. Ask for the software price on its own and see what happens.

Cloud POS and on-premise POS: the trade is real

"Cloud point of sale software" means the data lives on a server you do not run and reaches you over the internet. On-premise means it lives on a machine in your outlet. Each has a failure mode that the other does not, and the honest answer is that both matter.

Biller.app is cloud-based, and it keeps billing when the line drops: orders and stage changes are held on the device and sent when the connection returns — up to 5 days since the device last reached the internet, and 24 hours in a browser that has not guaranteed its storage. Settling a bill needs the server for a moment, because the GST invoice number comes from it.

Do you need to buy a POS machine?

Probably not to start. Biller.app runs in a browser and as an Android app on Google Play, on the phones and tablets your team already carries — waiters take orders on their own handsets and the kitchen sees them immediately, with no terminal bought to make it work.

A thermal printer is worth having once volume justifies it, and it is optional rather than required: a bill can reach the customer on WhatsApp instead, which is often faster than the printer queue. If you later want a wired or networked printer at the counter, that is an addition to a setup that was already working, not a precondition for starting.

A cafe counter, a bar and a full-service floor

The phrase "POS for a cafe" usually means speed at the till; "the best POS for a bar" usually means control — who opened a tab, who poured, who closed it. Both are the same software with different parts switched on.

• Counter service, cafes and bakeries. Few tables, high ticket count, and a bill that has to be done before the queue notices. Table management matters less than how many taps a sale takes.
• Bars and pubs. Long open tabs, items added over hours, and a strong need for roles and an audit trail on who changed what.
• Full-service restaurants. Table state, kitchen stages, splits and transfers mid-service, and a floor team working on separate devices.
• Multi-outlet. Each outlet with its own menu and taxes, with one view across them. Multi-outlet support, role-based permissions and the live kitchen display ship today.

What "free POS software" means in practice

A free restaurant POS is usually one of four things: a trial with an expiry date, a tier with the features you need removed, a cap low enough to force an upgrade, or free software that comes with paid onboarding or mandatory hardware. Any of those can be an honest offer; the problem is when the qualifier is one page further in.

Ours is a one-time grant: every new outlet gets 510 Biller.app credits, given once, no card. A plain bill costs one credit, so roughly 510 bills before you decide anything. The credits do not expire and nothing counts down. After that you buy a prepaid pack or take a plan, and there is no standing free tier underneath either of those.

What Biller.app's counter does today

• Menu from a photograph. Photograph the printed menu and review the items, prices and categories the AI read back, in about two minutes. Or import a catalog as CSV and export it back out whenever you want.
• A live kitchen display. Orders land on the kitchen wall as they are taken and move stage by stage as the food does.
• Nine roles, unlimited team members. Owner, manager, godown manager, staff manager, cashier, waiter, kitchen, delivery and accountant, with no per-user charge.
• GST documents from the first bill. Tax Invoice and Bill of Supply, correct splits, sequential numbering, plus the filing exports — GSTR-1 tables 4A, 7, 12 and 13, GSTR-3B 3.1(a), the CGST and SGST reconciliation, and CMP-08 for composition-scheme outlets.
• Ingredient-level stock and procurement. Dish sales deduct ingredient stock automatically and unit-aware, with low-stock alerts, a weekly reorder list rounded to buyable packs, a supplier book and one-tap purchase orders.
• Insights written as sentences. A daily sales and inventory digest in plain language — what sold, what did not, what to push tomorrow — in English, with Hindi rolling out.

What it does not do

• No direct aggregator connection. Orders from Swiggy and Zomato do not reach the counter on their own, in either direction. It is on the roadmap for this year and it is not shipped.
• No e-invoicing. IRP and IRN are not built. That is legally mandatory only above ₹5 crore annual turnover, so below that it changes nothing for you — and above it we are not the right fit yet.
• No receive-against-purchase-order step. You can raise a purchase order and keep a supplier book; matching a delivery back to the order it came from is not built.
• No bundled hardware, and no dealer network. There is no field engineer to send. If you want someone to arrive and install a terminal, that is a real reason to choose something else.

How to evaluate one in an afternoon

1. Ask the software price without hardwareIf it cannot be quoted separately, you are buying a bundle.
2. Open a tab, add to it twice, then split itIn the demo, performed rather than described.
3. Raise one bill of each order typeDine-in, takeaway and delivery, and read the tax lines on all three.
4. Pull the connection mid-orderThen restore it and check nothing was lost.
5. Sign in as the most junior roleAnd confirm that person cannot see the day's revenue or change a price.
6. Export your menu and your billsBefore you commit anything, prove you can get your data back out.

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