Card payments made up 64% of all UK payments last year, so card machine fees now touch most of what you take. Yet few owners can say what their real rate is. Here is what sits inside the fee, which parts you can negotiate, how to work out your effective rate and why the cheapest headline price is not always the cheapest option.

The UK's analogue phone network closes on 31 January 2027, and around 350,000 business premises were still on copper lines this summer. The phone behind the bar is the easy part. Older card machines, monitored alarms, lift lines, door entry panels and franking machines can all depend on the same old line. Here is how to find them before they go quiet.

A stamp card is not a loyalty scheme, it is a discount with extra steps. The difference is data. Here is what the CMA found about how loyalty pricing actually works, and how to build a scheme in your EPOS that changes behaviour rather than just giving away margin.

Martyn's Law is expected to come into force in spring 2027, and any pub, club, restaurant or hotel that can reasonably expect 200 or more people on site will be in scope. For most venues it is about procedures, not purchases. Here is what the law asks for, how to work out your tier and where the doors, cameras and screens you already have can help.

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.