POS and operations

A café's till system quietly accumulates its most valuable archive: years of sales, the menu and its recipes, guest account balances, stock records. This guide covers what that data actually is, the questions to ask a provider before signing, the monthly export habit that makes provider changes survivable, and what guest data obliges you to handle carefully.

Every cloud till has the same weakness and it is worth planning for honestly: when the connection drops, order taking, the kitchen screen and the QR menu all stop together. This guide covers what actually stops, what carries on, the paper fallback to prepare in advance, the sequence to run during the outage, and what to re-key afterwards.

The rush feels like one problem but is always one of three — orders queueing at the till, drinks queueing at the machine, or tables queueing to pay. This guide walks through finding which one jams first from your own sales curve, the half hour of prep that prevents most of it, who owns what while it happens, and the two numbers that tell you whether it worked.

Takeaway money is real money — until it collides with your table service at the till, the kitchen and the pass. This guide separates the two flows, gives takeaway a queue of its own, plans packaging and the handover point, and lists what to fix before the morning rush arrives.

Splitting a bill is where service quietly dies: the table waits, the waiter does arithmetic, the till queues. This guide compares splitting by item, by equal share and by amount, walks a five-guest $86.40 bill through all three, and lists the payment-moment mistakes that cost cafés real money.