How to choose a POS system for a small business: a buyer's checklist

Short answer: pick a POS by testing your three busiest real situations on it: a rush with several customers, a return or exchange, and a day with the internet down. Then compare the total cost over three years, including card fees, hardware, add-ons and the cost of leaving. Features lists are similar across products. Behaviour under pressure and the real price are not.

What should a POS do at minimum?

• Ring up items fast by barcode, search or tap, with discounts and notes.
• Handle your taxes correctly, including inclusive and exclusive pricing, multiple rates and receipts that meet local rules.
• Accept the payment types your customers use: cash, cards, UPI or other local methods, split payments, credit accounts.
• Track stock as sales happen, with alerts for low stock.
• Handle returns, voids and exchanges with an audit trail and permission control.
• Close the day: cash reconciliation, sales summaries, tax reports.
• Control who can do what: cashier, manager, owner.
• Export your data in a usable format.

What questions separate good from bad?

What happens when the internet stops?

This is the most important question for a shop or restaurant. Some systems stop entirely. Some keep selling but cannot take card payments. Some run fully from a local database and sync later. Ask what is possible offline, for how long, and what happens when the connection returns. See what offline-first software is.

What are all the fees?

• Monthly software subscription, per register or per location.
• Payment processing percentage and fixed fee per transaction. Is it locked to one processor?
• Hardware purchase or rental, and who replaces it when it breaks.
• Charges for add-ons: loyalty, online ordering, inventory, accounting integration, extra users.
• Setup, training and support fees.
• Early termination or data export fees.

Request a written quote for your volume. A system that looks cheap on subscription can be expensive if it forces its own card processing at a high rate.

Who owns your data?

Can you export customers, products, sales and stock in CSV or a database dump, at any time, without asking? If the answer is no, switching later will be painful.

How does it handle tax?

In India, prices are often MRP-inclusive of GST, so the system must back out the tax correctly per item, and keep rounding right. I wrote up the calculation in GST-inclusive MRP POS calculation. In other countries, check sales tax, VAT or GST rules and receipt requirements. Test with real invoices.

Does it fit your trade?

A grocery store, a clothing shop, a pharmacy and a restaurant need different things: batch and expiry, size and colour variants, tables and kitchen tickets, weighing scales. A general POS often handles one of these poorly.

Cloud, on-premise or hybrid?

Each has trade-offs in cost, control and failure behaviour. They are compared in cloud POS vs on-premise POS.

What tests should you run before buying?

• Trial with real products. Load fifty of your items with real prices and tax.
• Rush test. Ring up ten transactions as fast as you can. Count taps.
• Unplug the router. Do a sale, a return and close of day.
• Printer and scanner test with the exact hardware you plan to use.
• Export test. Download your data and open it.
• Support test. Ask a hard question in the trial and see how long the answer takes.
• Reference calls. Speak to two owners of similar businesses.

What are the red flags?

• No export feature.
• Long contracts with an automatic renewal.
• Pricing that appears only after a sales call.
• Required hardware that works with nothing else.
• No audit trail for voids and price changes.
• A refusal to explain what happens offline.

If you want something you can host yourself, with offline billing and your own data, look at the NodeDR POS case study. Whatever you choose, run the tests above first.