Finding the Best POS System for Your Small Business

We start our search for the best POS software on the market by looking at the most popular one. Thanks to a combination of an extensive feature set and affordability, Square has become a leading force in the point of sale market. The company has dedicated products for both retail and services industries.

Overview

Square Inc. provides its customers with an integrated payment system that offers flat rates across all payment methods. There are no hidden fees either, so you don’t have to worry about additional monthly costs. Setup is simple, and you’re ready to start accepting payments the same day you sign up to Square’s POS system.

At 2.6% + 10¢ for every dipped, swiped, or tapped payment you accept, it’s a very affordable POS system for merchants selling expensive items, but less so for those selling lots of cheap merchandise. Online payments are a bit more expensive, at 2.9% + 30¢. All payments get processed within up to two days unless you pay a special fee for same-day transfers.

Speaking of pricing, you have three options. The basic plan for retail and service industries is free. For $60 per location per month, you’ll get additional features, such as smart stock forecast and automatic purchase orders in retail or seat and course management for restaurants. Additional POS devices cost $40 each. There’s also a custom pricing plan for eligible customers, but you’ll need to process more than $250,000 in card sales to apply.

Square has the best POS hardware in the industry. Payments are processed using card readers, smartphones, tablets, and customer-facing POS devices by Square. Products can be added to customer carts by scanning barcodes, and the restaurant POS systems support bill-splitting and tipping features. Payments can be processed even while you’re offline - Square will simply charge the customer upon reestablishing the connection.

Square’s POS system also features robust inventory and order management, with automatic inventory tracking across all physical and online stores, bulk product uploads, and low stock alerts. There are also advanced customer and employee management tools, and Square might just have the best Android POS system around. You can easily set up user permissions and track your employees’ working hours (including overtime). At the same time, the customer tracking software lets you create specialized customer profiles and find out your top spenders, but advanced customer loyalty features will set you back an additional $45 per month.

Reporting features are top-notch. The administrative dashboard lets you quickly check KPIs, such as daily sales across all locations, average customer spending, best-selling items, customer visits, and more. You can sort the reports by location, time of day/year, or employee, and it’s easy to export them into third-party account apps like Quickbooks. As with all top POS systems, Square makes it easy to integrate with third-party analytics, eCommerce, booking, and event management apps.

In addition to an extensive resource library on Square’s website, customer support is available by phone Monday to Friday, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT. You can also reach out at any time through email, Facebook, or Twitter. Sellers also have an active online community, and Square organizes events for its users.

Final Thoughts

Square is a fantastic POS company, offering a variety of quality services for affordable prices. As rightly pointed out by numerous POS system reviews, finding this level of all-around quality service elsewhere would be difficult, especially considering that the core plan is entirely free. That being said, the payment processing system favors companies that make large individual sales, and the flat-fee structure can add up costs if you accept lots of small payments.

Picking the best POS system without including Shopify would be like talking about the most popular social networks without mentioning Facebook. More than a million websites belonging to businesses from 175 countries run on Shopify’s platform.

Overview

Shopify provides its users with an in-house payment processing service called Shopify Payments. The system supports all types of credit and debit cards, and the transaction fees vary depending on your subscription plan. For example, if you’re using the basic $29/month Shopify plan, online transaction fees will set you back 2.9% + 30¢, but with the $299/month Advanced Shopify, these fees will go down to 2.4% + 30¢. In-person payments are cheaper (2.7% to 2.4%) and come with no fixed transaction costs (only percentages).

Shopify may not be the cheapest POS system around, but it does provide lots of payment processing options. In addition to credit and debit cards, the company’s hardware allows customers to use cash and check payments, store credit and gift cards. It’s also very easy to customize orders, and taxes are precalculated for each state, though you can set up manual calculations as well.

Shopify’s cloud-based app is compatible with a wide range of devices and operating systems, but the company also provides excellent on-site hardware, such as cash registers, label printers, and barcode scanners. 

What sets Shopify apart from its competitors is the option to lease Shopify hardware for a certain period. This makes it the best POS system for small business owners, as the equipment is delivered free of charge, and you can return it within 30 days if you’re not satisfied. 

To get inventory management features, you’ll need to move to the $79/month Shopify or $299/month Advanced Shopify plans. These offer access to Stocky, Shopify’s handy inventory management app that’s not available in the basic plan. It’s a worthwhile investment, in our opinion, as the app features numerous analytics tools, tracks stocks and transfers, suggests optimal inventory distribution and restocking times. You can also test the app by taking advantage of Shopify’s free two-week trial, which is available across all plans.

Whether you are looking for the best POS system for bars or run a retail store, Shopify’s customer and employee management features are uniformly excellent. In-built analytics and email marketing tools make gathering customer information and guiding them on their shopping journey a breeze.

Shopify even has a marketing menu that can be used to launch Google Ads and Facebook marketing campaigns. For employees, you can easily set up staff permissions and PIN logins. It’s easy to integrate employee data with the payment system to automate handling of payroll and potential bonuses.

Our Shopify POS review should also mention excellent third-party apps on Shopify’s app store. You can find valuable tools for tracking employee hours, creating polls and surveys for customers, managing local deliveries, and tailoring your checkout procedures.

Another standout feature of Shopify’s POS system is a fantastic set of blogs, software guides, and free tools like a logo maker, QR code generator, and profit margin calculator. If you need help from support agents, you can reach them 24/7 through live chat, phone, or email.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are looking for the best POS system for a small restaurant or need to organize a sizable retail enterprise, Shopify will do the job with aplomb. Although there is no free version available, the plans are affordable and come with free trials for both software and hardware tools. We would’ve liked more analytics features in cheaper plans, but the overall value proposition is fantastic, especially if you factor in the company’s substantial on-site resource library and the outstanding customer support team.

New Zealand-based Vend offers perhaps the best small business POS system on the market for businesses with fewer than ten outlets. With an HTML5-based site and a handy portable POS system for pop-up stores and outdoor markets, it’s the ideal solution for small-business owners looking for a mobile point of sale solution.

Overview

First, let’s talk about pricing. The three main plans on offer all include integrated third-party payments, one register per outlet, secure cloud backup, 24/7 customer service, and support for an unlimited number of products and users. 

The starting Lite plan will set you back $99 per month on a yearly plan and is ideal for businesses with a single location that earns less than $20,000 per month. If you’re looking for the best POS system for a grocery store, it’s a great fit.

Upgrading to the $159 Pro plan removes the limits on monthly turnover amounts while adding advanced reporting and analytics features. It also adds the ability to integrate with more third-party software (Lite plan supports only Xero and Quickbooks). 

The final option is called Enterprise, and it’s designed for multistore retailers or franchises, featuring advanced onboarding tools and a dedicated account manager. You’ll need to get a bespoke quote, but a 14-day trial is available to test things out without committing financially.

Despite being a top POS system, Vend doesn’t come with its own payment processing tools, which may come as a surprise to some. Instead, you’re free to choose among several third-party options, such as PayPal, Vantiv, and Square. Vend doesn’t sell its own branded hardware either but allows customers to buy third-party equipment from partners. This includes cash drawers and card readers, label/receipt printers, and barcode scanners, to name a few.

While Vend may not offer the best POS hardware out there, it does have a fantastic online platform with a robust offline mode, which works on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android systems. Inventory management is also top-notch, featuring real-time synchronization across all stores after each sale (both physical and online), detailed inventory reports, a free barcode scanner app, low stock alerts, and more.

Customer and employee management tools are also excellent. Vend makes it easy to set up loyalty programs and gift cards while collecting customer data during checkout procedures. Integration with Mailchimp and other similar tools simplifies email marketing to an almost automated level.

Vend also offers some of the best POS features when it comes to employee management. Every user in the system can be designated as either a cashier, manager, or administrator, and each role can have custom data access permissions. To-do lists are also easy to create, and the system tracks employee information in real time, making productivity monitoring a breeze.

Reporting features are a strong point for Vend, with the administrative dashboard showing daily, weekly, and monthly sales figures, customer counts, top products, employee performance, and many more advanced metrics. 

As with any good POS system, third-party integrations are uniformly excellent. From eCommerce and payment processing solutions, such as Shopify, to accounting and email marketing tools, such as Quickbooks or Mailchimp, you’ll be spoilt for choice with Vend.

In terms of customer support, Vend is one of our favorite POS solutions on the market. The support staff is available round the clock online and via the phone, while the company’s resource library is a force to be reckoned with, featuring free e-books, reports, forecasts, online courses, and more.

Final Thoughts

Vend is, without a doubt, a top POS service. With brilliant customer, inventory, and employee management tools and fantastic customer support, it offers its customers a comprehensive package at a reasonable price. There are cheaper options on the market, but few are as well-featured as Vend.

If you’re looking for the best POS system for restaurants, Toast might just be the ticket. The company specializes in point of sale systems for the service industry, focusing on restaurants and bars, even offering restaurant funding through Toast Capital.

Overview

Toast offers two main types of services: An online-only set of digital ordering solutions and an all-in-one POS system that includes on-site hardware. For this review, we’ll focus on the latter.

Toast offers three AIO solutions, starting with the completely free Starter package, which includes the cloud-based POS software, Toast’s integrated payment processing, basic customer care, and real-time fraud monitoring features. 

To get the best POS system for your restaurant, you will want to pick the $165/month Essentials or $272/month Growth plans, which add online ordering and delivery, advanced customer care tools, Toast’s TakeOut app for Android and iOS, and more. These features can also be added to the free Starter package as optional add-ons.

Toast’s integrated payment system accepts all major payment methods and offers fair rates. For example, a $25 bill will incur 79¢ in payment processing fees, 20¢ of which Toast will take, and 59¢ of which will cover interchange and network fees. 

Toast has the best bar POS system around. Servers get access to table layouts, and cooks can use text and push notifications to let them know the food is ready. Guests can use self-serving kiosks, POS terminals, or even Toast Go handheld devices. Splitting checks and tipping is also made easy, and Toast’s cloud-based software works offline, too.

Inventory management is fantastic, too, allowing you to track sales data, get accurate per-plate costs, map out inventory count according to the kitchen layout, and optimize purchase orders. The same goes for customer management, which features an automated loyalty program that tracks customer spending in real-time and allows them to redeem points for loyalty rewards. 

In its bid to be the best POS system for restaurant owners, Toast streamlines the ordering process, with online orders going directly to the kitchen staff. There is also a robust staff management system that tracks employee hours across multiple locations, calculates monthly paychecks, keeps track of state and federal labor laws, and more. Managers can quickly approve punch-in data, shift swaps, and PTO requests made by their team, and that data will immediately get synced with the payroll software.

Toast also has extensive reporting features. The software gives you a glimpse into the best-performing staff members and restaurants, best and worst selling menu items, and much more through detailed daily reports. 

Even the best POS system cannot cover everything by itself, which is why third-party app integrations are essential. Toast offers over 40 apps to further improve employee scheduling, accounting, and inventory management tasks, making it an ideal point of sale system for small businesses in the restaurant and bar industry.

The company has a local presence in more than 230 cities throughout the US, and the staff can be reached out to 365 days a year. Fantastic on-site support and staff training are a big part of why we consider Toast the best restaurant POS system around. Add to that a great resource library on the company’s site, and you get a clear picture of a company that goes the extra mile to provide quality customer care for its clients.

Final Thoughts

Toast is an excellent POS system for small-business owners that scales well for larger restaurant chains, too. With a free basic plan aimed at up-and-coming establishments, robust customer and inventory management tools, class-leading POS hardware, and brilliant customer support, the only downside worth mentioning in this POS system review is the integrated payment system. While still affordable, some third-party options may be cheaper.