29 August 2026
Switching your restaurant POS without closing for a day
Nobody changes POS because they are bored. They change because something broke, and they are afraid the change will break more.
Run both, briefly
The safest migration is not a cutover, it is an overlap. Put the new system on one counter for a week while the old one keeps running. The staff learn it during real service with a fallback two steps away, and you find the awkward cases — the regular who always splits, the dish that is priced by weight — before they matter.
A week is usually enough. The signal that you are done is not a date; it is that nobody has opened the old system for three days.
What actually has to come across
Less than people expect. Menu and prices, obviously. The customer list, which is the one thing that is genuinely irreplaceable — it took years to collect and cannot be rebuilt. Open table state does not migrate; you close the day on the old system and open the next on the new one.
- Menu with categories, variants and prices
- Customer list with phone numbers and visit history
- Tax settings and invoice series — start a fresh series on the new system
- Staff logins and what each role is allowed to see
The questions worth asking before you sign
Most of what goes wrong in a migration is decided before it starts, by questions nobody asked.
- Can you export your own data, in a format something else can read, without asking anyone?
- What happens to billing when the internet drops for twenty minutes?
- Who sets up the account, the menu and the tax settings — you, or them?
- How long from signing to taking a real order?
Why people move
In our experience the reason is rarely the billing screen. It is that billing, the customer list, reviews and social posting live in four different tools that were never designed to know about each other — so the guest who came in every week for a year is a row in one system and a phone number in another, and nobody has ever sent them anything.
If that is the reason, changing POS alone does not fix it. The thing to look for is whether the menu you maintain, the guests you bill and the numbers you read are one set of data or three.