How to Choose the Best Restaurant POS System in Australia
The POS system you choose affects everything from how quickly your staff can turn tables to the reporting insights that help you grow your business. With a lot of options on the market, some covering the full operation and others specialising in one part of the stack, finding the best restaurant POS for your needs starts with knowing what you're evaluating before you commit.
This guide covers what to look for in an Australian restaurant POS system, the questions worth asking any vendor, and how Toast addresses each one.
The Australian POS market
Restaurant owners researching a POS system in Australia will come across a handful of names repeatedly. Understanding what each vendor specializes in makes for a more useful comparison. The right fit depends on venue type, scale, and which parts of the operation matter most, such as payments, inventory, reporting, or all of them working together. The evaluation questions below apply regardless of which vendors you're comparing.
Toast
An all-in-one platform built specifically for restaurants, covering payments, POS, online ordering, marketing and guest engagement, inventory, staff management, and reporting in one connected system.
Square
An all-in-one point of sale platform used across retail and hospitality.
EposNow
A POS provider with a hospitality-focused offering.
Ordermate
Part of the Oolio group, which also includes Bepoz, IdealPOS, and SwiftPOS.
What to look for in an Australian restaurant POS
The right question for any POS vendor is "what am I paying across card processing, hardware, software, and every tool I need to run my business?" When comparing payment rates, confirm what the rate is across Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and EFTPOS, and what your processing costs look like once surcharging is off the table.
Payment rates and what they include
Payment rates and what they include
Surcharge settings
Effective 1 October 2026, the RBA began banning surcharges on its regulated card networks (Visa, Mastercard, and eftpos) covering debit, prepaid, and credit cards. This is a regulatory change that applies to all Australian merchants, not just Toast customers. You can read the RBA's full announcement here. American Express has communicated that they will also prohibit surcharging on 1 October, 2026.
Toast has updated to default surcharging settings along with this regulation to assist restaurants with compliance.
The right question for any POS vendor is "what am I paying across card processing, hardware, software, and every tool I need to run my business?"
When comparing payment rates, confirm what the rate is across Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and EFTPOS, and what your processing costs look like once surcharging is off the table.
When comparing quotes from any POS or payments provider, ask for their explicit post-ban processing rates to ensure you are evaluating true long-term costs .
Toast provides simple flat-rate card processing with custom, GST-inclusive rates quoted specifically for your business.
EFTPOS support
EFTPOS is the primary domestic debit network in Australia, and it's how a significant portion of your customers pay. Toast supports EFTPOS alongside Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and mobile wallet payments, Toast supports EFTPOS alongside Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and mobile wallet payments, all through the same terminal, without separate hardware or workarounds.
Offline reliability
Australia's connectivity is uneven. A café in a regional town and a multi-venue group in the CBD face the same challenge: downtime during service costs revenue and rattles the team. When your internet drops, Toast's offline mode keeps core in-venue services running. Staff can continue placing orders, sending tickets to the kitchen, and queuing car payments for background processing once reconnected. For venues in areas with unreliable connectivity, Toast also offers a cellular backup option that keeps orders and payments running through an outage. *
Public Holiday and Weekend Surcharge
Public Holiday and Weekend Surcharge In Australia, applying a surcharge on weekends and public holidays is legal and standard practice across hospitality. Your POS needs to handle this automatically. Toast lets you configure scheduled surcharges that activate automatically based on the day and time, so the right rate applies as soon as Sunday service starts without any manual steps.
Total Cost of Ownership
Toast brings orders, payments, staff management, and customers together in one connected platform. Features like staff scheduling, loyalty, and online ordering work as part of the same system, which means fewer integrations to manage and a cleaner picture of what you're paying.
Integrations
Some functions should not require an integration at all. Basic loyalty and payments working natively in the same platform is meaningfully different from managing several separate tools that talk to each other. When integrations are necessary, the cost and complexity of each one adds up. Toast gives you access to multiple integration partners across accounting, payroll, delivery, reservations, and marketing, including Australian platforms like Xero and MYOB.
Reporting and marketing
Sales, guest, and performance data come together in a single view, accessible from anywhere you have internet, so you can run your venue remotely and review performance before you walk through the door. ToastIQ, Toast’s built-in AI reporting layer, helps you chat with your data to surface insights automatically rather than requiring you to build the report yourself. Toast IQ is designed for restaurant owners, managers, and multi-location operators who want faster insight into sales trends, menu performance, guest behavior, and operational opportunities. 1
How to evaluate your options
Before committing, work through these questions with any vendor you're considering to find the best restaurant POS for your needs.
What are your non-negotiables?
Write them down before looking at any demos. These might include payments that work offline, KDS, table management, split bills, catering and event management, or public holiday surcharges. Toast covers all of these natively, from offline order taking to automatic public holiday surcharge configuration. Get a full demo from a sales representative and make sure to ask them to cover your must haves in the demo.
How intuitive is the software?
New staff often need to be trained mid-shift, so ease of use matters as much as feature depth. Ask how long it typically takes someone with no POS experience to run a table competently, and request hands-on time with the actual interface as part of any demo. Toast is built for exactly this kind of fast, mid-shift onboarding.
What's native and what requires an integration?
Ask for a breakdown. Every integration is an additional subscription, an additional login, and an additional place where things can break. Toast handles loyalty and payments natively, and connects to multiple integration partners, including Xero and MYOB, for everything else.
What does the total cost look like?
Get a full quote covering hardware, software, processing rates across all card types, integrations, and support. Toast's flat-rate, GST-inclusive pricing makes this comparison straightforward from the start.
Toast for Australian hospitality
Australian hospitality covers a lot of ground. The café culture is one of the most developed in the world, with cities like Melbourne consistently cited as global leaders for coffee. Pubs and bars form a core part of social life across every state. Restaurants range from neighbourhood locals doing 60 covers to large multi-site groups managing different menus, teams, and service styles across venues, and venues built around catering and private functions are a growing part of the market too. The operational requirements across all of these are genuinely different, and a system that handles one well does not automatically handle all of them.
Toast covers the full range. Whether it's a café managing a high-volume morning rush, a pub running kitchen and front of house across a busy public holiday weekend, or a restaurant group tracking labour costs across multiple locations, Toast handles the operational depth each of those requires. Every service model and venue type gets the same connected platform, from quick service to fine dining, from single sites to hospitality groups.
Surcharge configuration
For Australian operators, that includes automatic public holiday and weekend surcharge configuration, offline mode keeping core services running , and 24/7 support from people who understand what happens when things go wrong. When the Sunday surcharge needs to activate at midnight or your internet drops during a dinner service, the platform handles it without your team having to intervene.
For multi-location operators, Toast lets you manage menus, compare performance, and push updates across all venues from a single dashboard, so growth does not mean losing oversight. This includes multi-venue groups operating under separate Australian Business Numbers (ABNs) per site, a structure that can mean separate accounts and separate reporting with some other providers. Toast combines reporting across every venue in the group regardless.
Frequently Asked Questions
The best POS depends on your venue type, size, and what you need it to do. The most important criteria are offline reliability, total cost of ownership, EFTPOS support, and whether the system handles AU-specific requirements like public holiday surcharges automatically.
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