Till systems for small businesses

A till system, or EPOS, is software that records what you sold, for how much, and how it was paid for. If you want the full definition and the record-keeping rules that sit behind it, the EPOS guide covers HMRC, Making Tax Digital and VAT in detail. This page is about the money: what a till costs a small UK business over a year, and which of those costs are avoidable.

The four things you are actually buying

Quotes arrive as one monthly figure, which is exactly why they are hard to compare. Every till system is really four separate purchases, and you can buy them from four different places:

1. Hardware. The screen you tap, plus any drawer, printer or scanner.
2. Till software. The thing that holds your product list and records sales.
3. Card processing. A completely separate service that moves money from a customer's card into your bank, charged as a percentage of everything you take.
4. The contract. How long you are committed for, and what it costs to leave.

Split them apart before you compare anything. A provider quoting "£39 a month, all in" and one quoting "free software" can easily end up costing the same, or the reverse, depending entirely on the third item.

Hardware, honestly costed

The single biggest saving available to a small counter is not buying a till at all. A tablet or phone you already own runs a browser-based till perfectly well, and for a stall, a van or a one-counter shop that is genuinely the end of the hardware conversation.

If you do want dedicated kit, buy it in this order of usefulness:

• A stand. Twenty to forty pounds, and worth more per pound than anything else here. It turns a tablet into something a customer can see and you can tap without holding.
• A cash tin or drawer. A lockable tin is fine at a stall. A powered drawer needs a printer or hub to trigger it, so it drags other purchases along with it.
• A card reader. A payments decision, not a till decision. Covered below.
• A receipt printer. Fifty pounds and up, plus thermal rolls nobody quotes you for. Ask honestly how many customers request a receipt; at most food and drink counters the answer is close to none.
• A barcode scanner. Only earns its place above roughly two hundred lines. Below that, tapping a labelled button is faster, and you avoid barcoding your own stock.

Software subscriptions

Till software falls into three broad bands in the UK.

Free. Payment providers give away basic till software to win your card processing, and a handful of independent tools are free outright. Mini Till is in the second group: no account, funded by advertising and an optional paid stock system.

Around £20 to £70 a month. Cloud EPOS with stock control, staff logins, multi-site reporting and accounting integrations. This is where most quotes for a small shop or café land, and it is worth it if you use the stock control. If you do not, you are paying roughly £500 a year for a product list.

Several hundred a month, plus setup. Hospitality suites with table plans, kitchen screens and bookings. Real value in a restaurant with a kitchen pass, nothing at all for a coffee van.

What decides your band is not how big you are, it is whether anyone will act on the data. Stock control that nobody counts against is an expensive way to feel organised.

Card processing: the cost that dwarfs the rest

This is the number people underweight. A business taking £80,000 a year on card pays roughly £1,400 a year at 1.75%. That is more than most software subscriptions and vastly more than the hardware. Shaving a tenth of a percentage point off your rate is usually worth more than every other saving on this page combined.

Rates published by the three providers most small UK traders use, taken from their own pricing pages on 16 September 2026:

Three things those figures do not show. Hardware prices exclude VAT and move with promotions, so treat them as indicative. Non-UK, commercial and Amex cards can carry a different rate to a British debit card, which matters more than you would think in a tourist town. And a monthly fee that buys a lower percentage only pays for itself above a certain turnover, so do the arithmetic against your own card takings rather than the brochure's example.

Not every provider works this way. Several quote per business rather than publishing one rate, and several bundle the percentage into a monthly plan, so the headline number is not the whole price. Two questions settle it: what is the rate on an ordinary UK debit card, and what else is charged on top of it, per transaction, per refund and per month? Get both in writing. A quote you cannot restate in those terms is a quote you should push back on, and negotiated pricing is not automatically worse, it is simply harder to compare and usually comes with a contract term rather than a rolling arrangement.

Contract length and the cost of leaving

The clause that catches people is not the price, it is the term. Ask for these four answers in writing before you sign anything:

• The minimum term. Monthly rolling, twelve months, or the four-year deals that circulate in hospitality.
• What happens at the end of it. Automatic renewal for a further full term is common and legal, and it is how a one-year decision becomes a five-year one.
• Early termination. Often the remaining months in full, plus the outstanding balance on any financed hardware.
• Who owns the data. If you leave, can you export your sales history and product list, and in what format? "You can view it in the portal for 30 days" is not the same as a CSV file you keep.

The pay-as-you-go providers above all state on their own pages that there is no long-term commitment. Traditional EPOS resellers frequently do the opposite. Neither approach is dishonest, but they are not comparable on price alone.

What a small business genuinely needs

Strip it back and a counter taking under a few hundred transactions a day needs six things:

1. A product list with correct prices, arranged so the fast sellers are reachable without scrolling.
2. A quick way to ring up several items and see a running total.
3. A record of how each sale was paid, because that is what you reconcile against.
4. Change calculation, so nobody does mental arithmetic in front of a queue.
5. A daily total, split by cash and card.
6. An export you can hand to an accountant or load into accounting software.

That list is short deliberately. Anything beyond it should justify itself against a specific problem you actually have.

What gets upsold

None of these are bad features. They are simply sold to businesses that will never open them.

• Loyalty schemes. Effective in a shop with repeat customers who will carry a card or an app. Pointless at a one-day craft fair.
• Kitchen display screens. Genuinely valuable once a kitchen runs multiple concurrent tickets. A single fryer does not need one.
• Integrated e-commerce. Worth paying for if online and counter stock genuinely share a shelf. Otherwise it is a synchronisation problem you have bought for no reason.
• Staff scheduling and payroll modules. Almost always weaker than a dedicated tool, and priced as though they are not.
• Barcode scanning for a short menu. Covered above, and the most commonly wasted purchase of the lot.

Where the big names beat a free browser till

An honest comparison has to include the things Mini Till does not do. If any of these matter to you, buy the incumbent and do not think twice.

• The card amount goes to the reader automatically. With Square, SumUp or PayPal Point of Sale's own till software, ringing up £7.40 sends £7.40 to the terminal. With a separate till you key the amount into the reader yourself, which is one more chance to fat-finger a digit.
• Emailed receipts, and a printer that pops the drawer. Mini Till will print a receipt for any sale through your browser's own print dialogue, which covers the customer who asks. What it will not do is email or text one, or drive a till-roll printer wired to a cash drawer.
• Your data is backed up for you. An account-based system keeps your history on a server. Mini Till's free till keeps it in your browser, so clearing your browser data deletes it and taking a backup file is your job.
• Hardware and support you can phone. Warranties, replacements, and someone on the end of a line on a Saturday.
• Refunds against an original sale. A processed refund that reverses a specific transaction is a payments feature, and it needs the provider that took the money.

Where a free browser till does win: nothing to sign up for, no monthly fee, no percentage of your takings, no account that can be locked, and it keeps working when the signal drops. That last point is the whole argument for traders working from a pitch or a van. If you later need shared stock across more than one counter, Mini Till Pro is £10 a month and the till stays free either way.

Questions to ask before you sign

1. What is the minimum term, and does it auto-renew?
2. What is the total cost over three years, hardware, software and card fees together?
3. What is the in-person rate on a UK debit card, and on a non-UK or commercial card?
4. Is the hardware bought outright or financed inside the subscription?
5. Can I export my full sales history to CSV, whenever I like, including after I leave?
6. Which of these features will I open in my first month, and which am I paying for in case?
7. What happens to the till when the broadband or the mobile signal goes down?

Question six removes more cost than the other six put together.

Whatever you choose, run it free for a month on hardware you already own first, alongside a pay-as-you-go reader. You will learn your real transaction volume and your genuine cash-to-card split, so that if you do outgrow it you are negotiating with numbers instead of guesses. When you have chosen, the till manual covers the practical business of loading products and cashing up, and mini EPOS explained sets out what a cut-back system does and does not include.