How to choose a restaurant POS in Pakistan: 7 questions to ask any vendor

A POS is one of the few things in a restaurant you cannot quietly swap out on a slow Tuesday. It holds your menu, your prices, the day’s cash and the record of what everybody ordered, and moving off it halfway through a busy month has more in common with a renovation than with a purchase. The meeting where you choose one deserves harder questions than it usually gets.

We build a POS, so read this the way you would read anything written by a vendor. The standard we set ourselves is that all seven questions work on us, and that our answer to each is written down where you can find it. Where the honest answer is “not yet”, it says so.

Can I see it running on my own phone, in this meeting?

Not a video, not a slide deck, not a login on the salesman’s laptop. Your phone, your hand, one of your own dishes typed in while you watch. Everything else in the meeting is a description of the product. This is the product.

A vendor who needs a scheduled installation visit before you can see anything working is asking you to buy on trust, and to pay for the privilege of finding out. It also tells you something about the software: a POS that only runs after an engineer sets up a machine is a POS you will be waiting on every time something changes.

Where we stand: Foori runs in any browser and on the phone in your pocket, so the first meeting needs no hardware and no install visit. Put a real order through it before you agree to anything.

When does the setup fee fall due?

Many vendors here charge a one-off setup fee, ourselves included, and some charge none at all. The number matters less than the timing, because the timing tells you who is carrying the risk. A fee due at signature means you have paid for an outcome you have not received yet. A fee due at go-live means the vendor has to actually get you live before they are paid.

Ask for the answer in writing, in the same document as the price. “We’ll sort it out” is not an answer, and neither is a discount offered in place of one.

Where we stand: our setup fee falls due the day you are live and your staff are trained, not the day you sign, and if we never get you there you can ask for it back within 30 days.

What is in the setup fee, and who trains my staff?

Setup is where a POS purchase quietly goes wrong. The software is fine and the menu never gets entered properly, or it gets entered by someone at the restaurant at eleven at night, or two people learn it and both of them leave.

Get the scope written down. Who types in the menu, you or them. How many training sessions, and whether that number is per restaurant or per person. What happens in month four when the boy who knew the system takes a job somewhere else, and whether retraining his replacement is support or a new invoice.

Where we stand: setup covers installation, menu data entry and two staff training sessions, and retraining after someone leaves is part of support rather than a separate charge. The pricing page lists what setup costs on each plan.

It is 9pm on Saturday and the POS is down. What happens?

This is the question the whole purchase turns on, and it is the one most likely to get a vague answer. Push until you have three specifics: who picks up, how fast, and what it costs them if they do not.

The third one is the real test. Support hours are easy to promise. A commitment that costs the vendor money when they miss it is a different kind of statement, and vendors who will not make one usually have a reason. Ask whether their support hours cover your service hours, because a kitchen taking last orders at midnight is not served by a line that closes at six.

Where we stand: if Foori is down while you are serving, that month is free. The term is written against your service hours rather than office hours, and the WhatsApp line reaches the people who work on the product.

What happens when the internet drops?

Connectivity in Pakistan is not a hypothetical. Anyone who has watched a queue build while a card machine hunts for signal knows what an hour of it costs.

So ask plainly: if the connection goes at eight in the evening, can staff keep taking orders and printing receipts, and what happens to those orders when it comes back. Then ask the follow-up that separates a real answer from a reassuring one, which is whether it works that way today or is something they are building.

Where we stand: offline service is on our roadmap and has not shipped. We would rather you knew that in the first meeting than discovered it in the third month. Ask every vendor the same question, including us, and be careful with the ones who answer it too smoothly.

What am I actually signed up for, and what does a second branch cost?

Two different things hide in this question. The first is the exit: whether you are on a month-to-month arrangement or an annual contract, what leaving costs, and how much notice it takes. The second is growth: what the price does when you open a second branch, add a terminal at the counter or put another person on the system.

Both are worth settling before you sign rather than after, because both are priced very differently by different vendors and neither is negotiable once you depend on the software.

Where we stand: Foori is month to month with no annual contract, and you can leave at the end of any month. Every tier price and every add-on is on the pricing page rather than in a quotation you have to ask for.

What if you are not here in two years?

Fair question, and the right one to finish on. Any vendor can be gone in two years, and the large ones are not automatically the safe answer. What you can judge is how much of your money is exposed if it happens.

A vendor who takes a large payment up front, locks you into a year and asks you to buy their hardware has moved that risk onto you. One who is paid on go-live, refundable, month to month has kept it. Ask what you would actually lose if they disappeared in month seven, and see whether they can answer it in numbers.

Where we stand: the setup fee is not due until you are live, it is refundable for 30 days, and there is no annual contract. In the early days you also get the founders on WhatsApp, which is not a business continuity plan but is a good deal more accountable than a ticket queue.

The question this list leaves out

Tax compliance belongs on a list like this, and it is not here because the answer depends on where you trade and what you sell. Restaurants in Punjab answer to the Punjab Revenue Authority, while the FBR runs its own integration scheme, and the boundary between them is not something a POS vendor should be deciding for you. We wrote up what each authority actually does separately, along with what we sell today and what we do not.

If you only ask one

Ask what happens on a bad night. Everything a vendor can say about features is demonstrable in ten minutes on a good day, and none of it tells you anything about the evening the system stops. The two answers you will remember are the one about Saturday at nine and the one about what you would lose if the company folded, because those are the two that cost a vendor something to give.

Ours are on the guarantee page, in the same words we would use if you were holding us to them.