A countertop till built around your counter.
Not around a product roadmap.
The till is the busiest screen in the business. It should carry your twenty best sellers two taps from the front, print to the right station, and agree with your website and your stock without anybody reconciling anything.
Start a projectWhat makes a countertop till good
A till is used a hundred times a night by someone who is not thinking about it. Everything that matters is about speed and about what happens when something goes wrong.
The common order in two taps
Your busiest twenty items should be reachable without a search, in the order your staff actually sell them, not in alphabetical order. We lay the buttons out from your own sales data once there is some, and from your word before that.
Modifiers that do not slow the queue
Every option a customer asks for in your shop should be one tap from the item, including the combinations that only make sense in your trade. A till that needs six taps for "large, no onions, extra sauce" is a till that gets worked around.
Mistakes that are easy to undo and hard to hide
Voids, refunds and no-sales happen. They should take one tap, require a staff code, and leave a line in an audit log that nobody can quietly delete. That protects you, not us.
It keeps working when the internet does not
A till that stops taking orders because a router rebooted is not a till. Orders queue locally and sync when the line is back; card payments depend on the reader, and we will tell you exactly what yours does.
Custom, and what that actually buys you
Plenty of good off-the-shelf tills exist, and for a simple shop they are the sensible choice. Custom earns its keep in three specific situations.
Your operation has a shape no product expects
Two shops sharing stock, trade and retail prices on the same item, a kitchen that batches, deposits on orders, an account customer who pays monthly. These are where off-the-shelf tills start needing spreadsheets alongside them.
The till has to be one part of a bigger system
If you already have, or want, an ordering website, a kiosk, a loyalty scheme or a delivery operation, the till is the piece that has to agree with all of them. Built together, they share one menu and one stock count; bought separately, they are four systems that each think they are right.
You are tired of renting
Subscription tills charge per terminal per month, forever, and the price moves. A built system has a build cost, then hosting and card fees. Over several years in a shop with several terminals the arithmetic changes, and we will do that sum with you honestly, including the cases where it does not favour us.
Printing, which is where most till projects actually fail
The receipt and the kitchen ticket are two different jobs, and the kitchen ticket is the one that ruins evenings.
Cloud-connected thermal printers
We have wired cloud printers that pull their jobs over the network, so there is no PC in the back acting as a print server and nothing to log into after a power cut.
The queue is the backup, not the afterthought
Paper runs out, printers jam, somebody unplugs one to charge a phone. Every ticket stays in an on-screen queue and reprints on demand, so a printer fault is an annoyance rather than a lost order.
More than one printer, by station
Fryer, grill, cold prep, bar. Routing items to the right station is a configuration we set up with you, and getting it right removes most of the shouting.
Receipts people can read
Your name, your VAT position if it applies, the order number the customer is waiting for, and the items in the order they were chosen. It sounds obvious and plenty of tills get it wrong.
The hardware, bought once and owned
We specify hardware and let you buy it, rather than reselling it. You own the terminals, and if you ever leave us they still work.
The terminal
A countertop touchscreen, ideally one with a sealed front that survives a wiped-down counter. Screen size matters more than processor speed for a till.
The card reader
Integrated with the till so the amount is sent to the reader rather than typed in. Typed amounts are how a £44 order gets charged £4.40 at eight on a Friday.
Cash drawer, if you take cash
Opened by the till, logged when it opens, and reconciled at close against what the system says should be in it.
A customer-facing screen, if the counter has room
It removes the "did you say twelve forty?" conversation and makes tipping and loyalty prompts possible without a member of staff asking.
What it costs, and what moves the number
We quote a fixed price against a fixed timeline, in writing, within 48 hours of understanding what you need, and we quote the hardware separately so you can see both.
How many terminals and sites
One till in one shop is a different job from four tills across two sites sharing stock, mostly because of what has to be true when two terminals disagree.
How complicated the product list is
A hundred items with simple options is quick. Trade and retail pricing, deposits, batching, weight-based items and account customers each add real work.
What it has to connect to
A website, a kiosk, accounting, delivery dispatch, a loyalty scheme. Each integration is a point of failure that has to be built and then tested properly.
Whether anything is being migrated
Moving product lists, customer accounts and balances off an old till means mapping data and checking it twice. It is unglamorous and it is the part that protects you.
How the printing and the card handling actually work
The two parts of a counter that cause the most trouble after install are both defined by published specifications, so they can be settled before anybody buys hardware.
- The printer asks; nothing in the shop sends. Star Micronics’ CloudPRNT protocol has the printer poll a web address by HTTP POST to ask whether a job is waiting, with a default polling time of five seconds on current models including the mC-Print2, mC-Print3 and TSP100IV. Nothing in the shop acts as a print server, so there is nothing to restart after a power cut.
- A polling printer needs no open port. Because every request is outbound, the printer works behind an ordinary router without a fixed IP address or a forwarded port. The credential belongs in the request headers rather than in a URL somebody could copy out of a browser history.
- Card entry stays with the payment provider. PCI DSS applies to every business taking cards, and the shortest self-assessment is open only where card data never touches your own systems. On a counter that means the terminal and the provider’s own fields, decided when the till is built rather than when the questionnaire arrives.
Sources, checked 26 October 2026
- Star Micronics, Star CloudPRNT Protocol Guide 2.6.0: the client polls the server by HTTP POST
- Star Micronics, Client settings: default polling time of 5 seconds on mC-Print2, mC-Print3, TSP100IV and mC-Label models
- PCI Security Standards Council, Document Library: where PCI DSS and the self-assessment questionnaires are published
Before you ask.
What does a custom till system cost?
Is a custom till better than Epos Now, Square or Lightspeed?
Can it run on an iPad?
Do you take a percentage of our sales?
What happens to our data if we stop working with you?
Can two shops share one system?
- Kiosk tills →A second queue that takes its own orders during the rush.
- Kitchen display systems →When a screen beats a printer, and when it does not.
- Epos Now, Square, or a custom till →Their published prices, the three-year arithmetic, and when buying the product wins.
- Custom EPOS or off the shelf? →The longer argument, with the cases where off the shelf wins.
Ready to get started?
Tell us what you need. We will scope it, price it and build it.
Start a project →