Trade is fine. The profit is not. Between rising wages, business rates and thin margins, the difference between a busy bar and a profitable one now sits in the operational detail: how fast a round gets served, how accurately an order reaches the kitchen and whether you know your GP before the month closes.

December has to carry January, and most festive till problems are set up in October. This Christmas EPOS checklist covers the jobs worth finishing now: festive menus and price levels, logins for seasonal staff, card machines, kitchen routing, Wi-Fi and consumables. Work through it this month and your busiest nights will run on a system you have already tested.

Guests do not experience your bar, your restaurant, your shop and your activity desk as separate businesses. If your tills treat them that way, you lose spend at every handover and you never see what a guest is really worth.

Paper chits curl, fall off the rail and get read wrong at the worst possible moment. A kitchen display system puts orders on screens, timestamps every stage and tells you where a ticket sat. Here is what that changes for ticket times, order accuracy and waste, and the situations where a KDS makes things worse rather than better.

Aggregators are excellent at finding you a new customer and expensive at serving you the same one twice. Here is how takeaways and quick service operators use EPOS, self-service kiosks and their own online ordering to keep more of every repeat order.