An EPOS system for bars and restaurants earns its keep by protecting margin on trade you are already doing, not by finding you new customers. That distinction matters more in 2026 than it has for years. The problem facing most UK venues is not empty tables. It is that full tables no longer guarantee profit.
The British Beer and Pub Association recorded 161 pub closures across England, Scotland and Wales in the first quarter of 2026, roughly two a day, a 26% increase on the same quarter of 2025 and around 2,400 jobs lost. As reported by The Morning Advertiser, BBPA chief executive Emma McClarkin made the point that these closures are avoidable because pubs are trading briskly. The profit is being wiped out by costs, not by a lack of customers.
If that describes your venue, the lever you still control is operational. Here is where an EPOS system actually moves the number.
Because the cost of serving each customer has risen faster than the price you can charge them. Labour, rates and duty have all climbed at once, and a venue running the same service model it ran five years ago is absorbing every one of those increases at full cost.
The House of Commons Library notes that there are approximately 170,000 hospitality businesses in the UK, of which 97.7% are small businesses, and identifies labour and materials costs as the central pressure on turnover. Small operators have the least capacity to absorb cost shocks and the least head office resource to re-engineer their operation in response.
That leaves three practical targets: seconds per transaction, errors per shift, and the lag between something going wrong and you finding out about it.
A table plan turns the till into a live map of the room, so any member of staff can pick up any table without asking who is serving it. ICRTouch TouchPoint supports multi-level table plans, which matters for venues split across floors, a garden, a snug and a function room.
The operational gain is not cosmetic. When tabs are tied to tables rather than to individual servers, a bar can flex staff between sections during a rush without orphaning a table. Splitting a bill across six people stops being a five minute negotiation at the till while a queue builds behind it. Transfers between the bar and the restaurant happen without a re-key.
You can see the full feature set on our EPOS solutions for bars and restaurants page.
Yes, if your servers currently walk to a fixed till to key in orders they have already written down. That walk is dead time repeated hundreds of times a shift, and the handwritten step is where most order errors are introduced.
Handheld ordering with PocketTouch sends the order to the kitchen or bar printer at the moment it is taken. Staff stay in the room. Rounds get in earlier, which is the single most reliable way to lift spend per head on a wet-led site without changing a price.
We covered the mechanics of this in detail in The Walk to the Till Is Costing You Covers, including what it does to covers per shift and order accuracy.
It adds capacity at the exact moment you have run out of it. ByTable lets guests order and pay from their own phone at the table, with the order landing in the same system as everything else and no commission taken on the transaction.
The realistic use case is not replacing table service. It is the beer garden on the one hot Saturday in July, the function room at the back, or the last hour before a fixture kicks off. Those are the periods where you either put on an extra body or lose the sale, and an extra body at 2026 wage rates is an expensive way to serve a round of four.
You need sales, stock and staff data in one place, updated as it happens rather than reconciled after the fact. TouchOffice Web reports live from the till, so a wet GP that has slipped is visible on a Tuesday rather than in a spreadsheet three weeks later.
This is the difference between managing a venue and auditing it. Yield on draught, spend per head by session, void and refund patterns by staff member, and which lines are actually moving all become questions you can answer the same day. Combine that with TouchStock for handheld stock counts and deliveries and the gap between what you should have sold and what you did sell stops being a mystery.
The infrastructure underneath the till, which nobody thinks about until it fails mid-service. Your EPOS terminals, card machines, handhelds, kiosks and screens all share one connection. Consumer-grade broadband in a venue full of customers streaming video is a card payment outage waiting for a Saturday night, which is why we wrote about business Wi-Fi for hospitality venues.
The same applies to the phone. Every call that rings out during service is a booking somebody else took, a point we made in our piece on VoIP phone systems for pubs, restaurants and takeaways. And a static blackboard cannot change a price by the hour or push tonight’s fixture, which is the argument for digital signage that earns its keep.
Start with the bottleneck you can name. If your queue is at the bar, look at speed of service and handhelds. If your kitchen is sending the wrong food, look at order transmission and a kitchen display. If you cannot tell a good week from a bad one until the accountant tells you, start with reporting.
Buying a complete platform in one go is rarely necessary. TouchPoint, PocketTouch, ByTable, TouchKitchen, TouchStock and TouchOffice Web share the same live data, so a venue can start with the till and add modules as the case for each one becomes obvious.
CCR Systems has been supplying, installing and maintaining EPOS systems for hospitality across the North West and the wider UK for more than 40 years. We are an Authorised ICRTouch Partner, and we look at how your venue actually trades before recommending anything.
Call 0151 644 8296, email contact@ccrsystems.co.uk or get in touch here.
