Choosing a POS system you will not have to replace in two years

Switching POS systems always costs more than the software does. The menu is retyped, the staff are retrained, and the historical sales almost never come across. So the question worth answering is not which system looks best in a demo — it is which one you can still live with when you have three thousand products, four staff and a second branch. This page sets out the five things that decide that, and answers each of them for Korat, including where the answer is no.

Korat's POS is free. There is no monthly fee for the till, the menu, the stock, the orders or the reports, and no percentage is taken from your sales, because a customer's money never passes through the system at all — they pay the shop directly in cash, by PromptPay or by bank transfer. The system records and reconciles; it never holds the money.

Five things that decide whether a POS lasts

1. Where prices are calculated. If the price of a line is worked out on the tablet in the waiter's hand, the bill and the report will disagree one day. Here place_dining_order and place_shop_order read the price, the option surcharges and the delivery fee from the database and discard whatever the client sent — the same rule on the restaurant side and the retail side.
2. When stock is decremented. Stock that moves when someone remembers to move it is not stock. Here it is attached to each product variant, not to the product name, so a large bottle and a small bottle hold their own counts.
3. How fine the staff permissions are. A sales assistant should be able to open the till without seeing payroll or reports. That is decided server-side by has_capability(business_id, capability), with preset roles and per-person overrides — the same row-level security machinery the rest of the platform runs on.
4. Whether your data survives you leaving. Sales, receipts and the customer list have to stay readable. Here an expired plan closes the buttons that create new things; the existing menu, orders, reports and history stay readable and are neither deleted nor hidden.
5. Whether the specific things your trade needs exist today. This is the question every vendor site answers most vaguely, which is why each of the five pages below states both what works and what does not.

Different trades need different tills

A buffet charges by head and by clock. A grocery lives on stock and margin per item. A cafe lives on one drink that splits ten ways. A single screen that tries to be all three will be good at one of them. Korat keeps one core and lets the business type decide which tiles the business console assembles.

• Buffet restaurant POS — per-head packages, child pricing tiers, session timers, last orders, leftover charges
• Grocery store POS — stock, low-stock alerts, goods receipts, credit terms, real cost of goods sold
• Coffee shop POS — option groups, toppings, cup sizes, time-limited menus, bar display
• Which POS software is best — 12 questions to ask every vendor, ours answered in full
• What a POS system costs — all four bills, not just the licence

Multi-branch is in the same account, not an upsell

When the second branch opens, the till is not the problem. The problems are where the new branch's menu comes from and where the combined numbers live. The branches tile totals sales across every branch in the same group and copies a whole menu to a new branch in one action, while each branch stays its own business account with its own stock, its own staff and its own permissions.

What this system cannot do

• No Thai tax invoices. Only VAT-registered businesses may issue them and the system has nowhere to record a shop's registration. It prints receipts, quotations, invoices and credit notes.
• No sale-by-weight and no connected scales. A USB barcode scanner does work — it types into the search box, which matches on the product code.
• No receipt-printer driver. A receipt can be reprinted and turned into a message to send, but there is no direct thermal-printer connection.
• Table plans are a list, not a drag-and-drop floor plan. There is a table register and a QR per table; there is no graphical layout screen.
• No automatic backups. The database is on the provider's free plan, so there is no daily backup to fall back on. Export your reports periodically if the numbers matter.