Notes
Choosing a till that works when the NBN does not
Offline mode, how fast a new casual learns it, and whether it talks to Xero. What I check now, having chosen badly once.
Fourteen years in IT and nobody once asked me to choose a cash register. Servers, yes. A tape library I still think about at odd hours. Then I took on one floor of a knitting mill in Collingwood and had a fortnight to pick a till, while working out whether a 1930s floor waste counts as plumbing or archaeology.
I have since sat across the bench from four advisory clients making the same decision. They all start where I started: on the demo. The demo is the version where the internet works, the menu has six items on it, and nobody is behind you with a pram in one hand and a keep cup in the other.
The morning the NBN dropped
Second winter, a Saturday, twenty to nine. Eleven people in the queue, two of them regulars who would have been fine and nine of them who were not going to be. Our POS then ran in a browser tab on two tablets, and when the connection went both showed a spinner where the menu had been. The answer to “what does the toastie come to with a large oat latte” became a matter of collective memory.
We took orders on the back of the docket roll. The card terminal still worked, because a terminal is a separate animal, so we keyed amounts in by hand and stacked the receipts on a spike. That part was fine. Sunday was not: forty-one transactions existed in the bank and nowhere else. Two hours with a biro. I had spent a decade telling a freight company in Laverton that their warehouse system needed to survive a backhoe through the fibre, and there I was, doing a stocktake off a spike.
Offline mode is the least glamorous line on any feature list, the one I would now put first, and the one the marketing quietly skips. There is a real difference between a system that caches your menu so the screen still renders, and one that will take an order, apply a discount, split a bill, print to the kitchen, capture a card payment, and reconcile the lot when the line comes back. Ask for the second, then make them prove it: have the salesperson pull the modem out of the wall while you ring up a full order. Anyone who will not do that in front of you has answered the question. Keep the counter tablet paired to a phone hotspot and test it monthly. Our July outage ran forty minutes; the hotspot had us trading again in ninety seconds.
A merchant facility is not a POS
These get sold together and they are different purchases. The merchant facility is the plumbing that moves money from a customer’s card into your account, priced as a percentage. The POS is the software that knows a flat white is $5.20, that oat is fifty cents, and that the order goes to the bar. Square and Zeller hand you the second cheaply because they earn on the first. Tyro sells the facility and expects you to bring your own POS.
Bundling is convenient. It also means that the day you change one you change both, so work out what leaving looks like before you sign. Can you export your own sales history to CSV for any date range, yourself, without lodging a support ticket? Is the hardware yours, or rented on a term with months left to run? And is that hardware worth anything to anybody else on the way out?
That last question is why I am quietly in favour of iPad-based systems for a small room. A Square Register at $1,099 is a good machine that will only ever be a Square Register. An iPad is an iPad, and when you change software it becomes the new software’s iPad. Owned hardware with a low replacement cost beats a rebate attached to a thirty-six month term, and that term is the deal I think small venues should stop signing.
The shortlist, as at 2026
Published rates as at 2026. They move, and two of these will not publish a number at all, which is information of a kind.
| Provider | Card-present rate | Hardware | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square | 1.6% in person; 2.2% online and keyed | Reader $65, Terminal $329, Register $1,099 | Square for Restaurants starts at $0 a month, the kitchen display is a paid add-on, next-day transfers included. Easiest to train a casual on. |
| Zeller | 1.4% all cards including Amex; 1.2% through Zeller POS; 1.7% keyed | Zeller Terminal $99 incl. GST | Australian, no monthly rental, settles next business day. The POS is younger than Square’s and the reporting shows it. |
| Tyro | Quoted per business, not published | Terminals supplied with the facility | Facility only, integrated with a long list of hospitality POS. The unbundled option, where your rate depends on how you ask. |
| Lightspeed Restaurant | Processing quoted separately | Bring your own iPads | Tiered subscription. The public page quotes USD, roughly US$69 to US$399 a month, kitchen display extra, AUD on application. Absorbed Kounta, which is why half of Melbourne still calls it Kounta. |
| Redcat | Quoted per venue | Varies | Turns up on Melbourne shortlists. Every venue I know running it has a duty manager and a function room. We have a bench. |
The criterion no table holds is how long it takes to teach the thing to a new casual on a Thursday. Ours is one shift: take an order, add a modifier, void your own mistake, split a bill, inside four hours with nobody hovering. If oat milk sits three screens deep you pay for it forever in seconds per customer, and seconds per customer is the whole business.
The export you should test before you sign
Every vendor claims Xero and MYOB integration. What they mean by it varies enormously, and the bad version is worse than nothing. What you want is one journal per trading day, split by tax code, with the merchant settlement arriving as its own transaction so the deposit reconciles against the sales and the fees sit on their own line. What you sometimes get is every individual sale pushed across as its own invoice, at which point your Xero holds forty thousand contacts named “POS Customer” by March and your bookkeeper starts quoting you differently.
This matters past tidiness. Business records in Australia generally have to be kept for five years from the date the transaction was completed, and the ATO is content for them to be digital provided they are a true and clear reproduction of the original and backed up somewhere you control. Your POS is a record-keeping system whether you meant it to be. If the only route to your own five years of sales data runs through somebody else’s support queue, you have not bought your records. You are renting them.
What changes on 1 October
The RBA published its conclusions on merchant card payment costs on 31 March, and the short version is that surcharging goes. From 1 October 2026, surcharges are removed on debit, prepaid and credit cards across the designated eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks, and those no-surcharge rules will be enforced by the card networks and payment providers rather than by the ACCC. Until 30 September the existing rule stands: you may surcharge, but by no more than what accepting that card genuinely costs you. Domestic interchange caps come down on the same October date, a ceiling on foreign cards follows on 1 April 2027, and new transparency requirements on what networks and providers charge you phase in across both dates.
If you have been passing that cost to the customer at the terminal, it becomes your cost, and it has to live in the price of the coffee or in your margin. Which turns the gap between 1.4% and 1.6% from a rounding error into something worth an afternoon. On $450,000 of card turnover it is $900 a year, a set of burrs and most of a service. Take your last three merchant statements and work out your real effective rate, not the headline one, which never includes the phone orders you keyed in by hand.
Whatever you land on, write your six most common prices on masking tape and stick it under the lip of the counter, where the staff can see it and the customers cannot. Ours has been there since the Saturday the spinner appeared. The tape has gone yellow and the toastie has gone up a dollar, and I am still not taking it off.