Choosing a point of sale system is one of the highest-leverage decisions a restaurant owner makes — it touches every order, every shift, and every dollar that comes through the door. Yet most comparisons online are written for U.S. software that treats Canadian tax rules and Canadian payment infrastructure as an afterthought. Here's what actually matters if you're running a restaurant in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, or anywhere in between, broken down into the seven questions worth asking before you sign anything.
1. Does it work when your internet doesn't?
Restaurant internet goes down more often than most POS vendors like to admit — a router reboot, an ISP outage, a busy Friday night overwhelming shared building Wi-Fi, a construction crew cutting a line down the street. If your POS is purely cloud-based with no local fallback, an outage means no orders, no payments, and a line of frustrated customers standing at your counter while you apologize and turn business away.
Look for a system that keeps a local copy of your menu, pricing, and open orders on the device itself, and can take orders, print kitchen tickets, and record payments entirely offline — then syncs automatically once the connection returns, with nothing lost in between. Ask a vendor directly: "If my internet drops mid-shift, what exactly stops working?" A vendor with a real offline story will have a specific, confident answer. A vendor without one will hedge.
This single feature prevents more lost revenue over a year than almost any other item on this list, and it's the one most owners don't think to ask about until the first outage already happened to them.
2. Can it handle GST/HST correctly, per province?
Tax handling isn't optional, and it isn't uniform across Canada. Ontario charges HST at a single combined rate. Alberta has no provincial sales tax, just federal GST. Quebec layers GST and QST together as two separate line items. If you operate in more than one province, or you're planning to, your POS needs tax configuration set independently per outlet — not a single rate hardcoded into the software that someone has to work around with manual adjustments.
Ask any vendor directly: "Can I set a different tax rate per location, and will it show correctly, itemized, on the receipt and in my sales reports?" If the answer is vague, or involves a support ticket to change, that's worth knowing before you sign a contract, not after your second location opens.
3. What happens as you grow to multiple locations?
A lot of POS systems are built for a single till and bolt on "multi-location" later as an expensive enterprise upsell, or worse, don't really support it at all beyond letting you create a second account. If there's any chance you'll open a second location — even a "maybe, someday" chance — ask upfront:
- Can I see combined sales reporting across all my locations from one login, or do I have to log into each separately and manually total the numbers?
- Can staff be assigned to specific outlets, with permissions that don't leak across locations, so a cashier at location A can't see payroll data for location B?
- Do menu changes, price updates, and new items need to be re-entered at every location, or can they be pushed from one place?
- Is there one protected "owner" account that can never be accidentally locked out, even if every other staff account gets reconfigured?
Retrofitting multi-location support onto a single-store mindset is expensive and disruptive — it usually means re-entering your entire menu a second time and retraining staff on a different workflow. It's far cheaper to start with a platform that was built around brands and outlets from day one.
4. Is the kitchen connected, or still running on paper?
A modern POS should talk directly to a kitchen display system (KDS) — orders fire to the kitchen screen the instant they're placed, organized by station and order type, with a running timer so nobody has to guess how long table 12 has been waiting. If your shortlist doesn't include a KDS option, or only offers one as a separate, poorly-integrated add-on from a different vendor, your kitchen is still relying on handwritten tickets and shouted orders during a rush — and every order is one transcription error away from coming out wrong.
5. What's the real, all-in monthly cost?
The advertised price rarely tells the whole story. Before signing anything, get clear written answers on:
- Is there a per-terminal fee, and does it change if you add a second till or a second location?
- Are kitchen display, digital menu, and customer CRM included, or are they separate add-on subscriptions that stack on top of the base price?
- What does hardware cost — receipt printers, kitchen printers, cash drawers, card readers — and is it compatible with what you already own, or does everything need to be replaced?
- Is there a cancellation fee, an early termination penalty, or a long-term contract you can't get out of if the software doesn't work out?
A system that looks 20% cheaper on the homepage can easily end up 40% more expensive once every "optional" module you actually need gets added back in.
6. Does it help you keep customers coming back?
Order-taking is table stakes — every POS does that. The systems that actually move revenue also help you understand who your customers are: visit frequency, average spend, favourite dishes. And they let you reach those customers directly, whether that's a WhatsApp campaign about a weekend special, or simply having a server recognize a regular by name because their order history is right there at checkout.
This is where a lot of "POS" software stops short — it's genuinely just a till, with customer data treated as an afterthought or not captured at all. If retention marketing matters to your business (and for most restaurants, repeat customers are the difference between thin margins and healthy ones), check whether CRM is a first-class part of the platform or something you'd need to bolt on separately.
7. Can you actually see it before you commit?
A polished sales demo with a stock menu tells you very little. Before signing, ask to see the system running with your own menu loaded in — your actual dishes, your actual modifiers, your actual pricing complexity. Watch how many taps it takes to place a common order. Ask what a shift report looks like at close. If a vendor is reluctant to show you this with real data, that's information too.
The bottom line
The right POS system for a Canadian restaurant handles outages gracefully, gets tax right without a manual workaround, scales cleanly to more than one location, connects the kitchen directly, is honest about total cost, and helps you keep customers coming back — not just ring them through once. Everything else — interface polish, extra reports, loyalty gimmicks — matters less than getting those things right.
FizzyPOS was built around exactly these points: offline-first ordering with local storage on every terminal, per-outlet GST/HST configuration, multi-location reporting and staff permissions from day one, a built-in kitchen display, and a CRM that's part of the core platform, not a bolt-on.
Curious how it holds up against what you're using now? Book a 20-minute demo and we'll walk through it with your own menu loaded in.