Vega
A POS for cafes in Kenya is built for a counter where a cappuccino, a samosa and a bottle of water land in one order, while three more customers wait behind it. Most cafe owners have tried running on a supermarket till, a notebook and memory. Memory loses. It loses fastest on paydays, on Mondays and in December.
This guide is written for owner-operators: the 20-seat cafe in Kilimani, the espresso bar near a matatu stage, the coffee cart outside an office park, the family cafe in Nakuru.
It covers the day-one tests, the monthly fees in KES, offline selling, loyalty, stock that spoils, and the questions to ask before you pay any deposit. Keep one thing in mind as you read: every POS for cafes in Kenya looks flawless in a demo. The truth shows up at 7:15 a.m. when the queue is deep and the router is dead.
Read it with your own counter in mind. Tick the tests you would run, write down the fees you would accept, and ignore anything that sounds like it was designed for a sit-down restaurant. By the end, you will know whether a POS for cafes in Kenya earns its place behind your espresso machine, or whether your current setup deserves one more disciplined quarter.
Why a Restaurant Till Is Not a Cafe Till
A restaurant till assumes waiters, table numbers, kitchen tickets and courses arriving in order. A cafe has none of that. The customer orders at the counter, pays immediately, and waits by the pickup point with a buzzer or an ear out for their name.
That single difference breaks restaurant software in ways that cost you minutes every hour. A POS for cafes in Kenya must handle a modified drink — medium cappuccino, extra shot, no sugar, takeaway — as a few fast taps, not a hunt through sub-menus. Restaurant tills treat each variation as a separate menu item, which is exactly how a 90-second ticket becomes five minutes.
Speed is the second break. Cafe customers are commuters with a matatu to catch, not families settling into a 40-minute meal. A till designed for table service has no opinion about the 8 a.m. rush, and the 8 a.m. rush is where a cafe lives or dies.
Then comes the ticket itself. What the barista needs is one clean line of text at the machine — drink, size, milk, extras, takeaway. A full kitchen display system built for a restaurant’s three stations is expensive noise at a two-person coffee bar.
Margin is the last difference. Espresso drinks carry some of the healthiest margins in food service, pastries spoil in a day, and the retail shelf of bean bags and mugs moves at its own lazy pace. A POS for cafes in Kenya has to show those three rhythms separately, or you will price your worst line off your strongest one.
None of this means restaurant software is bad. It means it was tuned for a different room. Buying it for a cafe is buying a suit cut for someone else’s shoulders.
Who Should Buy a POS for cafes in Kenya
This category fits espresso bars, coffee shops with counter service, coffee carts and kiosks with a machine, bakeries with a coffee counter, bookshop cafes and the coffee corner at a petrol station. If drinks are ordered and paid at the counter and collected within minutes, you are in the right place.
You benefit most if three things are true. You sell more than thirty drinks on a normal day. You have at least one barista who is not you, which means handovers and trust questions exist. And your pastries or snacks are counted at open and close, because they spoil and they walk.
You should wait if you run a full sit-down restaurant with waiters and table service, because that need belongs to a different guide. You should also wait if you are a wholesale bakery with no counter, since your money is in delivery notes and standing orders, not in speed at a till.
Multi-branch owners are a special case. If you run a second counter or a second branch and learn about problems at month end, a POS for cafes in Kenya with per-branch stock and one owner dashboard changes how you sleep. Platform-level plans exist for exactly this shape of business.
One honest warning before we continue. Software does not fix a slow barista workflow, a badly placed machine, or a pastry case that nobody faces. It makes good operations visible and bad operations expensive to ignore. Sort the workflow first, or at least together with the system.
What a POS for cafes in Kenya Should Do on Day One
Do not accept a slideshow. Ask the vendor to load your real menu on a device in front of you and run five tests while you watch. Any hesitation, any “that comes in the advanced training”, and you have your answer.
Test 1: Ring a modified drink in under fifteen seconds. Order a medium cappuccino with an extra shot, no sugar, takeaway. The system should handle size, strength and milk as quick modifiers on one screen. If the assistant types it as three separate items, your morning queue will drown in taps.
Test 2: Split one order between two payers. Two colleagues share a KES 740 order; one pays cash, one pays M-Pesa. The system must take both on a single receipt without creating two phantom orders. Splitting is a daily event at a cafe counter, not an edge case.
Test 3: Mark a loyalty drink. Put “Achieng” on her ninth latte and watch the screen show the free drink at ten. If loyalty lives on paper stamps, you already know how that ends — lost cards, shared stamps, and a free-drink cost nobody can audit.
Test 4: Kill the network mid-order. Switch off the router or flip the tablet to airplane mode and take five orders. Sales must continue, receipts must print, and you should see a visible queue of unsent records waiting to push. A frozen screen means the system was built for offices with fibre and backup power.
Test 5: Run the three eTIMS actions. Issue one invoice with a buyer PIN, issue one credit note against it, then disconnect and send an invoice from the offline queue. If the vendor fumbles any of the three, compliance becomes your problem instead of theirs. Confirm your current eTIMS duties with KRA or your accountant before signing anything.
Bring your own menu and your own barista to the demo. Salespeople move fast on their own sample data, and their shortcuts hide exactly the corners your counter will fall into. If the system passes all five, book a second visit at morning rush hour. Vendors send their sharpest staff to demos; your quietest Tuesday tells you nothing about your loudest Friday.
How a POS for cafes in Kenya Survives Blackouts and Dead Networks
Cafes live on power and network that fail at the worst times. Token meters run out on Saturday, estates publish outage schedules nobody reads, and the router dies with the mains. Offline-first is not a nice-to-have here. It is the difference between a queue that keeps moving and a queue that dissolves.
Insist on seeing the offline queue with your own eyes. Every order taken without network should sit in a visible list with a timestamp, waiting to push when signal returns. If the screen just spins, your records are resting on a hope.
Receipts must print offline too. A thermal printer connected by Bluetooth to the tablet keeps working through a blackout, and the paper slip is what you will count against cash when the lights return. Customers forgive a blackout; they do not forgive losing their order.
Ask what happens when power dies in the middle of an order. A half-taken order, a confused barista and a watching queue is a normal cafe moment. The system should resume cleanly, mark the interrupted order, and never charge twice when you retry it.
Power planning matters as much as network planning. A tablet and printer on a small UPS or a charged power bank will carry a morning; a solar panel keeps a phone-based setup alive all day. Ask the vendor what runtime their own cafe customers get, on their own battery setups, not in theory.
Make the drill a habit. On the first Monday of every month, pull the router mid-order and let the barista sell through a full hour of blackout, not a polite minute. That rehearsed reflex is what keeps your counter serving while the cafe next door writes orders on napkins.
Finally, check recovery. When the network returns, the queue must send everything in order and mark each record clearly as delivered. Silent syncing breeds double orders and missing money. You want to see it, not believe it.
M-Pesa, Cash and Split Bills at the Counter
At a cafe counter, payment variety is the norm. One customer pays cash, the next by M-Pesa, the next splits with a colleague, and the fifth belongs to an office account you invoice weekly. The system must take all five without the barista thinking about any of them.
Split payments must live on one receipt. Two people, one order, one part cash and one part M-Pesa, settled in seconds. Watch this exact demo before you believe any claims, because a till that cannot split cleanly will slow every shared order you ever serve.
STK push should match itself to the bill. The customer’s phone pops the request, they enter their PIN, and the order marks itself paid without anyone typing a reference code. Fewer typed references mean fewer “mistaken” transfers to investigate at close.
Cafes rarely run customer credit the way dukas do, because payment happens before the drink is made. The exception is the corporate account — the office two doors away that orders twenty coffees every Friday on invoice. That account needs its own ledger with balances aging in buckets: current, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. A POS for cafes in Kenya that cannot age a corporate account will turn your most reliable customer into your most stubborn receivable.
End-of-day reconciliation becomes simple arithmetic. Cash counted, plus M-Pesa received, plus card takings, must equal what the screen says you sold. When the three disagree, the gap sits in one report with a timestamp instead of in a group chat argument.
Voids and refunds need discipline. Every void should need your PIN, and every refund should land back on the same M-Pesa number it came from, logged with a reason. Refunds paid in cash while the sale stays on the books is how counters leak quietly for years.
Tip jars and staff coffees belong in their own lines too. A system that logs every staff drink separately is not hostile; it is the only reason the staff-drink cost is a number instead of a feeling.
What a POS for cafes in Kenya Should Cost Every Month
Kenyan vendors price in three broad bands. Entry-level software runs KES 500 to KES 3,000 per month and covers one counter, basic stock and daily sales. Mid-tier systems run KES 3,000 to KES 7,000 and add loyalty, richer reports and better support. Platform-level tools run KES 7,000 to KES 15,000 and suit owners of several branches who need one dashboard.
Most single-counter cafes should start in the entry band and upgrade only when the reports demand it. Do not pay platform prices for features you will never open. The money saved in year one buys a spare printer, a battery pack and a decent knife for the pastry case.
Hardware depends on your appetite. A full setup — terminal, receipt printer, cash drawer and scanner — lands between KES 60,000 and KES 120,000. A lean cafe kit — a good tablet, a Bluetooth thermal printer and a small cash drawer — does the job for roughly KES 25,000 to KES 70,000, and most cafes never need more.
Installation and training typically cost KES 30,000 to KES 40,000 for a full setup with a trained team, and a cafe deserves most of that budget. Loading a menu with modifiers properly, training a barista and a cashier, and cutting over on a live morning is real work. A vendor who quotes half that and finishes in an afternoon will leave you half-trained.
Demand renewal prices in writing before you pay any deposit. The classic trap is a cheap first year followed by a renewal letter that doubles the fee. If the number is not printed in the contract, treat it as open until you sign.
Ask what “free updates” means in year two. Some vendors charge for every new feature, some bundle everything, and some quietly raise the monthly fee after a promotion ends. The honest ones will show you the renewal clause without being asked twice.
Weigh monthly against annual payment too. Paying a year upfront often unlocks a discount, but it hands the vendor your leverage. Monthly payments keep both sides honest while you learn the system’s real character. A POS for cafes in Kenya that needs annual prepayment to show its true price is telling you something.
One more question: what is not included? Loyalty SMS notifications, extra users, receipt rolls, holiday support and data recovery all attract separate charges at some vendors. A KES 2,500 plan that bills KES 500 per support call is not a KES 2,500 plan.
Menu, Modifiers and the Morning Queue
Your menu is the system’s engine, so build it for speed instead of for beauty. Twelve core drinks with size and milk modifiers will cover ninety percent of orders. Everything else earns its place only if it sells weekly.
Modifiers must be one tap each, on one screen. Size, milk choice, extra shot, syrup, sugar, takeaway. If adding a modifier opens a second page, the barista will skip recording it, and your sales mix will quietly lie to you forever. A POS for cafes in Kenya with clumsy modifiers will cost you more in wrong drinks than it charges in fees.
Set favorites for the top six orders. “Regular white tea”, “Americano takeaway”, “Latte + samosa” should each be one key. At 7:30 a.m. your barista is not browsing a menu; they are firing the four orders the queue has already decided on.
Combos deserve their own keys too. Coffee plus pastry is your highest-margin moment, and one-tap combos raise it measurably. Track combo sales as their own line so you know whether the pairing is actually working.
The ticket at the machine must read cleanly. Drink, size, milk, extras, takeaway, order number, time. Test the printout with your barista, in the rush, under steam noise. If she squints, change the template before go-live, not after a week of wrong drinks.
Seasonal items need a proper launch path. The mango smoothie of February becomes the passion of August, and the menu should retire items cleanly instead of accumulating ghosts. Dead menu buttons slow every scan of the screen.
Watch the clock as a report, not as a feeling. Time from order to ticket, hour by hour, tells you whether the 8 a.m. queue is a staffing problem, a workflow problem or a keyboard problem. You fix very different things depending on which one it is.
Stock Control for Beans, Milk and Pastries
Cafe stock spoils, converts and vanishes, in that order. Milk turns daily, pastries turn once, beans convert into cups, and cups themselves disappear faster than anyone admits. The system must track all three behaviours without turning your barista into a full-time clerk.
Pastries are the simplest discipline. Count the case at open, count it at close, log markdowns and waste separately. A week of honest counts shows you exactly which tray to bake less of, and end-of-day discounts become a decision instead of a ritual.
Beans convert through recipes. A kilo of beans yields roughly fifty to sixty double shots, so a system with recipe depletion turns yesterday’s sales into today’s bean usage without arithmetic. Perfect accuracy is impossible in a busy bar; a consistent estimate beats no record at all. A POS for cafes in Kenya that tracks depletion will also flag the week your machine’s grinder started drifting.
Milk deserves a manual waste log beside the depletion estimate. Spoilage, steaming practice and the pitcher that keeps over-filling all live in that log. When milk cost appears as a report line, the waste conversation stops being personal and starts being practical.
Consumables vanish quietly. Cups, lids, sugar sachets, napkins and straws have no margin of their own but they enable every sale. Count them weekly, and put them on the same receiving discipline as stock.
Cake slicing needs conversion rules. One whole cake is eight slices, sold at slice price, with the unsold remainder tracked back in slices. This is the same unit-of-sale thinking a duka applies to sugar scoops, applied to your dessert case.
Receiving needs the same eyes as counting. When the dairy supplier delivers at 6:40 a.m., check the crates against the delivery note before signing, and record what arrived. A POS for cafes in Kenya that records receiving properly makes every later report trustworthy.
Dead stock applies to the retail shelf too. The bean bags, mugs and French presses that have sat since March are capital asleep on your shelf. A monthly dead-stock report turns them into a discount list and a smarter order.
Loyalty, WiFi and the Second Reason People Stay
Coffee taste brings customers the first time; habit brings them the fortieth time. Loyalty is how you measure and feed that habit, and a digital scheme does it without cards, stamps or arguments.
The standard structure works: every ten drinks, the tenth is free. Phone-number lookup at the counter keeps it simple — no app to download, no card to lose, no forging. A POS for cafes in Kenya with phone-number loyalty will show you exactly who your regulars are, by name and by month.
Watch the repeat rate as a report. The share of customers on their third visit or more tells you whether the loyalty scheme is alive or decoration. If your repeat rate never moves, the problem is the reward, not the software.
WiFi belongs in the same conversation. Vouchers issued per purchase, or a simple code rotated weekly, turn connectivity into a controlled courtesy instead of an open tap. Track vouchers as items if you issue them formally, so hotspot abuse does not eat your data bundle.
Corporate accounts overlap with loyalty but behave differently. The Friday order for the office upstairs is a relationship, and it deserves its own ledger, its own aging report and its own invoice with a buyer PIN when eTIMS applies. Offices pay slowly and reliably; your records should reflect both.
Prepaid coffee cards, where you offer them, are a liability. Every un-redeemed shilling on a card is money you owe in coffee. A system that tracks card balances keeps that liability visible instead of discovering it when a customer relocates.
Retail shelf items deserve separate margin lines. Bean bags, mugs and presses do not behave like drinks, and lumping them into “sales” hides which shelf products actually earn their space. Keep the line clean and the shelf starts paying rent.
Staff Permissions, Drawer Discipline and Audit Trails
A cafe runs on two to four people who share a till, a machine and a pastry case. That intimacy is exactly why the audit trail matters. It is the only neutral witness at the counter.
Set roles cleanly: barista takes orders, cashier handles money, supervisor voids and discounts. Voids and refunds should need your PIN, and every override should be logged with a time and a name. If a demo lets any cashier void freely, walk out.
One drawer, one name, one shift. The count at handover should match the screen within seconds, and any difference should sit in a recorded line, not in a shrug. A POS for cafes in Kenya that enforces shift drawers ends the handover haze where yesterday’s shortfall becomes nobody’s shortfall.
Discount rules belong in the system, not in memory. “Pastries go half price after 6 p.m.” should be a permission with a time window, so the discount appears as policy on the receipt instead of as favouritism in the drawer. A POS for cafes in Kenya with time-windowed discounts protects both the margin and the barista.
Staff drinks need their own line. Every flat white the team drinks is a cost, and an honest log turns it from a leak into a line item you chose to carry. Teams behave better when the log is visible; the point is not suspicion, it is clarity.
The audit trail answers what notebooks cannot. Who opened the drawer at 4:40 p.m.? Which pastry discount was entered twice yesterday? Which void had no reason attached? When the trail surfaces something, have the conversation early, calmly, with the log on the table. Owners who ignore a first small discrepancy teach the counter that records are decoration.
The “friends of the manager” discount is real in cafes. Regulars who expect the wink and the waived KES 50 are a hole you tolerate by choice. The system shows you the size of that hole per name, per month, so generosity becomes a budget instead of a leak.
Frame all of this to the team as protection, not policing. A clear permission wall means nobody gets blamed for a difference they did not cause. Discipline is easier to keep when the system, not anyone’s word, says no.
Reports a Cafe Owner Should Actually Read
Buy a system whose reports you will read in fifteen minutes a day, not one that exports forty spreadsheets nobody opens. Five lines carry almost all the value at a cafe.
The first is money against sales. Cash counted, plus M-Pesa received, plus card takings, must equal stock out at selling price. When those disagree, the gap has a name and a timestamp, and that is the entire argument for a POS for cafes in Kenya over a notebook.
The second is margin by category. Espresso drinks, pastries, retail shelf and combos each carry their own margin, and they move in different directions. Knowing pastries carry 45 percent while retail carries 25 percent tells you what deserves the counter’s prime space.
The third is waste. Pastry counts, markdowns and milk spoilage, trending weekly. One honest month of waste data usually pays for the software by itself in smaller trays and smarter baking.
The fourth is the peak-hour heatmap. Sales by hour, day by day, tells you when to schedule the second barista and when the quiet Tuesday can run on one. Staffing against the heatmap is the fastest cost saving in the whole system.
The fifth is loyalty and repeat rate. Who is on their ninth drink, who vanished for six weeks, how many customers returned this month at all. Regulars are a cafe’s real asset, and this report is the only way to see them before they are gone.
Set a rhythm and keep it. Fifteen minutes after close for the daily lines, thirty minutes on Sunday for the week, one hour at month end for margins, waste and dead stock. Reports only earn their fees when they change tomorrow’s orders.
Then compare months, not days. December against February tells you which drinks deserve the seasonal push and which staffing pattern carried you through. A cafe that plans by season eats one that plans by memory.
Hardware That Survives a Coffee Bar
A coffee bar is a hostile place for electronics. Steam, milk splashes, sugar dust, wet fingers and the radiant heat of an espresso machine kill consumer gadgets with cheerful efficiency. Ask what hardware the vendor’s own cafe customers have survived, and for how long.
The lean kit works: one good tablet as the till, one Bluetooth thermal printer, one small cash drawer, and a battery pack. Place the printer away from the steam wand and the machine’s heat, or you will be replacing it twice a year. A POS for cafes in Kenya running on a well-placed tablet outlives a badly placed terminal.
Screens need tempered glass and a wipe-down routine. Wet fingers and sugar dust make touchscreens lie about taps, and a screen that misreads a modifier turns into a wrong drink. Wipe it at every shift change with the same cloth you use on the steam wand guard.
Buy spares before you need them: a second tablet with the software installed, a second printer, a month of receipt rolls, and a charging cable that lives at the cafe. The day your only device fails is the day orders go back to napkins.
Power protection is cheap insurance. A small UPS keeps the router alive through short cuts, a power bank carries a tablet through a morning, and a solar panel suits carts and kiosks fully off the grid. Ask the vendor which accessories their cafe customers actually buy twice.
Decide the night routine: wipe, charge, lock or carry home. Carrying the till home is the cheapest security system ever invented, but it needs a battery that lasts the evening and a case that survives a rucksack.
Test everything with the staff who will live on it. Your barista should run a full order on the demo hardware before you pay, because a screen she cannot reach or read is a system you will replace. A POS for cafes in Kenya that passes the barista test passes the real test.
eTIMS and KRA Compliance From a Cafe
eTIMS is KRA’s electronic tax invoice system, and in plain terms it means the invoices your business issues can flow to KRA electronically. The details depend on your registration status and turnover, and they change, so treat this section as a software checklist and confirm your actual duties with KRA, your accountant or your county office.
The three live demonstrations still apply. Ask the vendor to issue an invoice with a buyer PIN, issue a credit note against it, and send an invoice from the offline queue while disconnected. A system that cannot do all three in front of you is guessing.
The corporate account is where compliance gets real for a cafe. The Friday office order that you invoice weekly is exactly the invoice that needs a buyer PIN, and the credit note when the order shrinks. Test both against a real office scenario, not a sample customer.
Receipts for every counter sale build the habit that protects you when obligations change. The habit costs nothing when a receipt takes four seconds, and a POS for cafes in Kenya that prints eTIMS-compliant receipts by default makes the habit automatic.
Keep the records the system produces: daily Z-reads, void logs, credit notes and the offline queue history. When a question arrives from KRA two years later, you answer from a file instead of from memory.
Your county papers sit in the same drawer. The single business permit and the food hygiene certificate keep the cafe legal at county level, and renewal dates belong in the same calendar as tax filings. Health inspectors do not care which POS you run, but the records it produces make every inspection shorter.
Turnover tax sits alongside eTIMS in the same conversation. Ask your accountant to read your first month of system reports. Clean numbers usually reveal deductions you were missing.
Installation, Training and Support You Can Verify
Installation should happen on a normal trading morning, not a Sunday when the cafe is closed. Watching the vendor load your real menu, your real prices and your real modifiers tells you more than any brochure.
Pick the go-live week carefully. Avoid the first week of the month, avoid December, avoid the week your supplier changes the pastry list. You want your calmest trading week for the first run, because you will be slower than the notebook for three or four days.
Decide the opening-stock question before install day. Pastries, beans, milk and the retail shelf all need opening counts, or your first week of reports will be fiction. A POS for cafes in Kenya that walks you through opening counts properly starts earning its fee on day one.
Training must include the barista and the cashier, not just you. If the vendor trains only the owner, the first sick day turns into a napkin day. Ask for a second free session a week after go-live, when the real confusion shows up.
Run the old notebook in parallel for one full week. Every order in both. On day seven, compare totals. This week costs you discipline and saves you from discovering a pricing mistake in month three.
Test support before you pay. Call the support line at 7 a.m. on a Saturday with a small question and time the answer. Support that only answers weekdays between 9 and 5 does not understand cafes.
Call two reference customers who run cafes, not restaurants. Ask them one question: “What went wrong in the first month, and how fast was it fixed?” Their pause before answering is part of the reference.
Agree in writing who does what when something breaks: response time, swap-out time for failed hardware, and who pays the courier. Written promises survive the honeymoon; verbal ones do not.
Questions to Ask Before You Pay Any Deposit
Walk into every vendor meeting with this list and tick answers in front of the salesperson. Vague answers are answers.
- Show me a cafe — not a restaurant — using this system today. Reason: counter service breaks systems that shine with waiters and tables.
- Ring a modified drink in under fifteen seconds, live, on my menu. Reason: modifier speed is the whole morning queue.
- Split one order between cash and M-Pesa on a single receipt. Reason: shared orders happen every hour at a cafe counter.
- What exactly happens to an order when power and network die together? Reason: this is your normal Tuesday, not an edge case.
- What is the full monthly cost including loyalty SMS, extra users and updates? Reason: the advertised price is rarely the paid price.
- Are renewal prices written into the contract? Reason: year-two surprises are the most common complaint in this market.
- Can a barista’s login be blocked from voids and discounts, and can I see every override? Reason: your audit trail is only as strong as your permissions.
- Demo the three eTIMS actions live, offline included. Reason: compliance failures land on your desk, not the vendor’s.
- What does the hardware warranty cover, and how fast is a swap? Reason: a dead printer on a Friday costs you a weekend of disputes.
- Can I export all my data if I leave, and in what format? Reason: your sales history is an asset; do not rent it forever.
Ask each vendor to answer all ten in one sitting. Vendors who score ten clean answers exist — keep shopping until you find one.
FAQ: Buying a POS for cafes in Kenya
How much does a POS for cafes in Kenya cost in 2026?
Entry-level software runs KES 500 to KES 3,000 per month for one counter, mid-tier runs KES 3,000 to KES 7,000 with loyalty and richer reports, and platform-level tools for multi-branch owners run KES 7,000 to KES 15,000.
A lean hardware kit of tablet, printer and drawer adds roughly KES 25,000 to KES 70,000 once, while setup with barista training typically lands in the KES 30,000 to KES 40,000 range. Get the renewal price in writing before any deposit.
Do I need a kitchen display like restaurants use?
Usually no. A clean ticket printing at the espresso machine covers a two-person bar completely, and a kitchen display is worth adding only when food orders grow past what tickets can carry. Restaurants need station-by-station displays; a cafe mostly needs speed.
Will it work during a blackout or when the network dies?
It must, and you should test it in the demo itself. Orders continue, receipts print over Bluetooth, and a visible queue pushes to the server when signal returns. A system that freezes without internet was built for offices with fibre and standby generators.
Can it run loyalty without plastic cards?
Yes, through phone-number lookup at the counter: no app, no card, no forging. The tenth drink triggers automatically, and the repeat-rate report shows whether regulars are actually returning. Test it with a real customer’s ninth visit, not with the vendor’s sample file.
Can it handle drink modifiers without slowing the queue?
Only if size, milk, extras and takeaway are one-tap modifiers on a single screen. Run the fifteen-second test in the demo with your own barista’s hands, because a modifier flow that needs two screens will be skipped in practice, and your sales mix will start lying.
Do I need eTIMS if my cafe is not VAT registered?
Your obligations depend on registration status and turnover, and they change, so confirm your situation with KRA or your accountant. What you can check today is the software’s ability: buyer PIN invoices, credit notes and offline queue sending, all demonstrated live.
Can I run two branches from one account?
Platform-level plans around KES 7,000 to KES 15,000 per month typically cover multiple branches with per-branch stock, shared menus and one owner dashboard. If you currently learn about problems at month end, a second window on your phone showing both counters live is worth the upgrade on its own.