How to choose a POS for a cha chaan teng

1. How many taps does one order take?

The problem is rarely missing features — it's that ordering a single 'Set A, egg sandwich, no spring onion, iced lemon tea less sweet, extra rice' takes fifteen taps. Ten extra seconds per table during the noon rush is ten minutes an hour, and that is exactly how the queue at the door builds up.

Don't judge from the demo video. Take your own most complicated set meal, place it yourself, and count the taps. Three to five is good.

• Common modifiers (no spring onion, less sweet, extra rice, swap drink) should be one tap, not typing
• Items can be assigned to individual diners at the table as they order, not untangled later
• Edits, voids and table transfers should not need a manager password every time — but must leave a record

2. Are set meals flexible enough?

A cha chaan teng menu is really "combo plus options": a set includes a main, a drink, sometimes toast, and every layer can be swapped for a surcharge. Many POS systems built for retail only model one layer of add-ons, so you end up creating a separate product for every combination — hundreds of menu items, and a nightmare to reprice.

Check for genuinely nested combos: groups inside a set, a choice count per group, per-choice surcharges, and whether the same item can be picked twice.

3. Can the water bar and kitchen be separated?

Cold drinks to the water bar, rice plates to the kitchen, toast to the bread station. This is table stakes, but not every system does it well. Ask not only whether it can split, but how finely — and what happens when a printer dies.

Paper jams, unplugged cables and empty rolls are routine. If a ticket depends on one printer, that printer is a single point of failure. A kitchen display as a second layer, or printers that can cover for each other, is what makes it safe.

• Route automatically by menu category (drinks / snacks / rice plates) to different stations
• Failover when a printer stops responding, or a screen that still shows the ticket
• Kitchen can mark items ready one by one so the floor knows what to run

4. How fast is splitting a bill?

Colleagues eating lunch together and paying separately is a daily event. If the system makes the cashier reconstruct who ate what, the till becomes the bottleneck.

The better pattern is to record which diner ordered which item at the time of ordering, so settling is just "charge this person's items". Also check that cash, Octopus, AlipayHK and WeChat Pay all settle on the same device rather than sending staff to a second terminal.

5. Will delivery orders be typed in twice?

If you run Foodpanda or Keeta, the biggest hidden labour cost is a staff member watching the platform tablet and re-keying orders into the POS. It is slow and it introduces mistakes.

Ask specifically: do platform orders reach the kitchen automatically? Does a price change need doing twice? Do customer notes ("no ice", "less spicy") arrive on the kitchen ticket verbatim? If any of those needs a human, the "integration" is not saving you anything.

6. What does it really cost?

The monthly fee on the quote is often not the whole number. Ask item by item: setup fee, training, per-terminal or per-account charges, commission on sales, paid add-ons, contract length, and what happens at renewal.

A practical comparison: work out the two-year total, not the monthly price. A cheap monthly plan that charges per terminal and takes a commission can cost more over two years than a higher all-inclusive plan.