Restaurants & Food Service// topic
Integrating with the POS on the counter
In short
Platform by platform, how a POS actually exposes its catalog and its order write path — Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, PAR Brink, Petpooja — and where partner approval, not engineering, is the real blocker.
8 pages
definitions
- External IDs: the mapping table nobody designs until it breaksThe identity map between your catalogue and the till is the contract that makes every order possible, and 4 routine events break it silently. Design it as a versioned artefact.definition8 min
- Order source and dining option: two fields your reporting rests onTwo small POS fields decide whether an injected order is taxed, routed and attributed correctly — and a wrong value is invisible until the first report nobody can answer.definition7 min
- What a POS partner programme gates, and what it does notA partner programme is a commercial gate wearing technical clothing. It controls scopes, production credentials and listing — and the wait is somebody else's decision, not engineering.definition7 min
diagnostics
- It works at the first location and returns an auth error at the other fourIdentical code, one store working and four rejecting, means authorisation was granted per merchant location and only completed once. The fix is an inventory, not a retry.diagnostic9 min
- The full menu sync hits the limit before it finishesA sync that works on a 40-item menu and dies on a 400-item one is not too big. It is making one request per item, at the same minute as every other location.diagnostic9 min
- The order lands in the POS and nothing prints at the stationThe POS accepted your order and the line never saw it. Routing is configuration — dining option, revenue centre, station map — and no field in your payload can override it.diagnostic10 min
- The POS says it sent the event and your system never movedA status event that arrives after service is worth nothing. Five places it dies before your handler, and why the durable fix is a polling sweep over open orders rather than better webhook code.diagnostic10 min
- Your total and the POS total differ by a few paise on every ticketThe POS is the pricing authority and your cart is a quote. A flat offset and a per-line drift have different causes, and only one of them is worth engineering time.diagnostic10 min
Other topics in Restaurants & Food Service
See allWorking on something in this space?
Tell us where you are in a sentence or two. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right team, and what a sensible first slice of the work looks like.
Start the conversation