Restaurant POS System

Top Mobile Restaurant POS Systems of 2019

A point-of-sale system is an important factor in a restaurant’s success for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it’s the system that facilitates all electronic payments, and in a world where plastic is king, a flawlessly operating POS is a must.

On top of that, paying the bill is often the last step of a customers’ dining experience, and any hiccups could be the difference between a great review and a customer walking away with a bad taste in their mouth (no pun intended).

It’s clear why no restaurant can afford to do without an effective, reliable POS. Luckily, BAMS integrates with 24 of the most popular point-of-sale systems on the market today, including the following four merchant-favorite mobile systems.

Lavu

Lavu is a highly flexible iPad-based point-of-sale system that has become the leading mobile POS for bars and restaurants. It offers a full suite of mobile payment options, including contactless payments and traditional swipe or chip card payments via integrations with hardware like Square. Lavu also integrates with PayPal’s EMV-compliant chip card reader for merchants processing their payments through PayPal. In addition to their iPad-based POS, the company also offers self-serve kiosks to help streamline the guest ordering experience.

Lavu’s system offers an entire suite of features to aide front and back-of-house staff, including menu customization, automatic tab authorization, pre-selectable happy hour settings, inventory tracking and control, advanced reporting, and much more. The system offers an open API so that restaurants can customize and configure their implementations based on their evolving needs.

 

Lightspeed Restaurant

Lightspeed offers the same tableside ordering and mobile-POS benefits as most of its competitors along with some unique features that make it an attractive solution. One of those features is Lightspeed Accounting, an integration that allows the POS to be synched with a restaurant’s accounting software to automate parts of the bookkeeping process, automatically sync data, and offer advanced reporting to managers.

Lightspeed comes with a no-cost EMV-compliant terminal which, while a bit bulkier than some other options, allows servers to process card payments directly at table-side without having to walk away with a customer’s card.

 

Clover

Clover is a cloud-based mobile POS company that offers point-of-sale systems built on Android. Unlike Lavu and Lightspeed, Clover only offers proprietary hardware, and their system can’t be loaded onto an existing tablet. With that being said, the products Clover offer are innovative, and their line covers a wide array of customer needs.

The Clover Flex is a small handheld POS with a touchscreen built-in, perfect for tableside ordering and payments. Their Clover Mini is a more traditional mobile POS that offers a wider feature set useful to restaurants including configurable floor plans, tab pre-authorization and more. Both are EVM-compliant and can accept swipe, chip, or contactless payment. At $499 US and $599 US respectively, they’re also very affordable POS systems.

 

ShopKeep

ShopKeep is another iPad based mobile POS popular with bars and restaurants, processing over 289 million transactions per year. Their POS can be integrated with card readers like Square, but ShopKeep also offers a complete hardware kit providing all the components a restaurant needs to accept payments, including an iPad enclosure, cash drawer, EMV-compliant card reader, receipt and kitchen printers, and more.

Their POS software offers fully-featured front and back of house management, advanced analytics, tableside ordering capability, staff management, accounting integration, online ordering, and many more of the features restaurateurs expect from a mobile POS.

In addition to these four popular mobile POS systems, BAMS also integrates with 21 more of the industry’s best mobile and fixed point-of-sale solutions. Whichever system your restaurant chooses, we’re ready to help get you up, running, and accepting electronic payments with the minimum hassle possible. Contact us today to request a quote or find out more about how BAMS can help your restaurant take the headache out of electronic payments.