Restaurant POS for UK

How to think about this

Start with the restaurant workflow, not a feature checklist.

A restaurant POS affects order accuracy, staff training, payment flow, printer reliability, kitchen communication, reporting, and how managers recover from mistakes. The right question is not “does it have many features?” but “does it make daily service easier and safer?”

Ask whether staff can complete common tasks quickly, whether your hardware works, whether your data can be backed up, who fixes problems during service, and what happens when the internet is unreliable.

What the market looks like in practice

UK VAT is 20% standard with reduced rates of 5% and 0%, and Making Tax Digital (MTD) is the default route for VAT reporting.

UK restaurants running FloCafe should plan VAT as a per-product percentage, separate the standard, reduced, and zero-rated lines cleanly, and decide whether to keep category-level tax tables or per-item overrides for mixed baskets. MTD-compatible bookkeeping software sits outside the POS, but the data FloCafe exports should be reachable in the formats an accountant expects. Contactless card-present payments are dominant at the counter; cash tips are still common in pubs and full-service. Pubs, cafes, takeaways, bakeries, and food trucks form most of the addressable market, and age verification for alcohol sales is a workflow the POS should support without friction. FloCafe fits operators who want local data, MIT licensing, and a test-first path on hardware they source themselves, rather than a managed subscription tied to a payments contract.

Where FloCafe fits

Useful when ownership and transparency matter.

Public project materials describe workflows for dine-in, takeaway, delivery, table management, modifiers and addons, multiple payment methods, invoice generation, KDS, KOT printing, kitchen stations, ESC/POS thermal printing, barcode lookup, staff roles, customer data, loyalty, WhatsApp e-billing, backup history, optional Google Drive backups, multilingual UI support, SQLite, Electron, Next.js, TypeScript, and WebSocket updates.