Restaurant POS software in India: features, cost & how to set it up

A restaurant lives or dies on its floor speed and its margins — and a good POS protects both. Beyond printing a bill, the right system ties together your kitchen, your stock, your online orders and your GST filing. Here's what to look for in India, and what it should cost.

What a restaurant POS must handle

Fast billing with GST (CGST/SGST) and split/merge bills.
KOT — kitchen order tickets sent straight to the kitchen printer/screen.
Table and floor management for dine-in.
Menu, modifiers and combos with quick edits.
Inventory and recipe costing — know the margin on every dish.
Online orders (Swiggy/Zomato) and your own QR-menu ordering, in one screen.
Daily sales, item-wise and staff-wise reports.

Cloud POS vs offline billing machine

A cloud POS runs on any tablet or laptop, syncs across outlets, and gives you live sales on your phone. A pure offline machine is cheaper up front but blind — no remote view, no multi-outlet, painful to expand. Most growing restaurants should start cloud, with offline-tolerant billing so a dropped connection never stops service.

What it costs in India

Off-the-shelf restaurant POS is typically a monthly/annual subscription per outlet — fine to start, but it never stops, and multi-outlet chains feel it. A one-time custom POS costs more on day one but ends the rent: you own it, add outlets without per-seat fees, and change the workflow whenever your menu or process changes.

Common mistakes to avoid

Buying on price alone, then paying forever in subscriptions.
No inventory/recipe costing — you can't see which dishes lose money.
A POS that doesn't merge online-aggregator orders with dine-in.
No offline mode — one internet blip and billing stops.
Locked-in data you can't export if you switch.

Our take

We build restaurant POS + inventory systems as a one-time, fixed-price project — billing, KOT, tables, GST, recipe costing, QR ordering and aggregator sync — that you own outright, with a money-back guarantee. There's a live POS demo on our products page; send us your menu flow and we'll match it.