Restaurant POS for USA

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

US sales tax is set state by state, with no federal VAT or GST layer on top.

Operators configuring FloCafe in the USA typically handle sales tax as a percentage per category, mapped to the state or locality where each order is fulfilled. Tip handling varies by state and city, and the POS must support pre-tax and post-tax tip prompts, tip pooling, and out-the-door totals that match what the customer signs. Card-present EMV and contactless are standard, and PCI scope reduction is worth designing for: keyed entry should be rare, and the POS should not store full PAN data. Square and Toast dominate the US restaurant POS market, so any open-source evaluation is happening against well-known commercial benchmarks. FloCafe is most relevant in the USA for operators who want code access, local SQLite storage for sales history, MIT licensing, and the ability to test against their real menu and printers before depending on the system for live service.

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.