You are comparing two tills. These are the questions that decide it.
If you arrived here comparing Foodics and Managely, this will save you time. Foodics is a well-established name, and we are not going to talk about it — we are going to talk about the questions worth asking any point of sale before you buy, and our own answers to them. Ask the same questions of anyone else you are considering, and compare the answers yourself. And we work every counter — restaurants and cafés as much as supermarkets, pharmacies and fashion chains — so this is not about a vertical. It is about what happens when the line drops and the drawer comes up short.
The six questions, and where they came from
These come from real installations in shops and restaurants, not from a feature list. Each one reveals something the price and the screen do not, and each one you can ask to see in front of you rather than hear about.
Take the six to any vendor you sit in front of. Whoever hesitates on one of them has told you what you need — and that is cleaner than any written comparison.
Question one: does the branch run itself?
Every cloud point of sale has to answer one question: when the line drops, does the shop keep selling? And when it comes back, do the invoices land in the order they happened, or in whatever order they arrive?
Here, every branch has one small machine that runs it completely, and the tills talk to it over the shop’s own network. The shop does not stop, and there is no central box whose failure halts every branch. This is not an emergency mode — it is the system’s normal state.
Ask any vendor to cut the line in front of you, finish a sale, print a receipt and close a shift. Whoever hesitates here, you will know in three minutes.
Question two: where does a shortage in the drawer go?
This is the question that separates systems, and most are thin here — they hand you a report showing the difference and stop. A report is not an action. The money that is missing stays missing.
Here the drawer is counted without the expected figure on screen, so a count is a count rather than a number copied across. And a shortage does not simply pass: it becomes a debt in the cashier’s name, it cannot be closed without a second person’s named approval, and the next shift is blocked until an action closes it.
Cash handed between people — office to till, till to till, till to safe — is a two-person movement: one hands over, one counts and signs. Even the change passed from one cashier to a colleague is a movement with both names on it, inside a ceiling head office set.
Shop owners rarely lose money to a big theft. They lose it to small differences nobody is answerable for. A system that records the difference without attaching it to a person is documenting the loss, not preventing it.
Question three: the awkward items in retail
A restaurant sells items from a menu. Retail sells much harder things, and this is where the shape of the system genuinely differs:
Scales — weighed goods read straight off the scale label, price and weight from the barcode with no typing. Batches and expiry — you know which batch went out on which sale, the difference between a recall you can execute and one you cannot. Serial numbers — captured at the sale and checked at the return, so a unit that never left your shop cannot be refunded into it. Units — the same product by piece, by pack and by case, each with its own barcode and price. And sizes and colours without turning one product into forty records.
A pharmacy needs batches and expiry. A phone shop needs serials. A supermarket needs scales. A system built for a kitchen has no reason to carry any of it — but if that is your business, you are buying the wrong shape.
Question four: how the customer pays
Most systems assume one customer pays one way. A real counter does not work like that.
On one invoice at the same time: part cash and part card, cash in more than one currency each at the branch’s rate, loyalty points as part of the payment, and a voucher against part of the bill — with change calculated correctly across all of it. A payment method the branch may not take is not offered at all, and a stale exchange rate is refused rather than guessed at.
Question five: where is the sale recorded?
Everything above assumes that what was recorded arrives. So ask: is the sale recorded on the till itself, or somewhere the person at the counter cannot reach?
The difference shows up the day a machine is dropped, stolen, reimaged, or wiped by an employee on their way out. Here the till is a screen and the recording happens in the branch, so deleting the program or swapping the machine loses nothing. And the branch is the only thing that talks to head office — a machine stolen off the counter has no route to your books at all.
Say to the vendor: "If the cashier reimaged this machine right now, what do I lose?" The answer separates a system that records from one that watches.
And then: the money reaches the books by itself
This is what the whole article used to be about, and it is still true — but it is now the last point rather than the only argument. Sales, refunds and cash movements land in the accounting books themselves: inventory, accounts, payroll, and branches in different currencies, on the same subscription.
Your accountant works in a real accounting system, not in a file exported from the till at month end and reconciled by hand.
If you are a restaurant with one or two branches, compare both and pick what fits. If you are retail, or you have branches, or you carry real cash custody — you are comparing two different shapes, not two different prices.
Leave a comment