What to look for in a POS in 2026 — beyond the brochure

Every POS demo starts the same way: a glossy iPad screen, a basket of items, a “look how easy it is to take payment” moment. Ten minutes in, you can’t tell two products apart.

The product difference shows up later — at month-end close, during a power cut, when an inspector arrives, when you try to switch vendors three years down the line. Here are the seven questions we’d ask any POS vendor, including ourselves.

1. What happens when the internet drops?

The one question that splits the market. The answer you want is: “Nothing visible to the cashier. Cart, payment, receipt, kitchen ticket, Z-reading — all work offline; the queue drains when the link comes back.”

The answer many vendors give: “We cache the cart, but card payments and receipts need a connection.” That’s a half-answer. A half-offline POS is a fully-broken POS on the day Melita has an outage. We wrote a full post on the offline flow.

2. Can I read my own data, in a structured format, today?

You’d think this is obvious. It isn’t. A surprising number of cloud POS vendors will hand you a PDF report or a CSV that’s only sometimes machine-parseable, and they’ll bristle if you ask for raw SQL access. Their export tool ships when you cancel, not while you’re a customer.

The answer you want is: “At any time, by tenant, into a portable format (JSON or Parquet) you can plug into your own analytics tool.” VIND ships a pnpm export --tenant=foo --year=2026 recipe in the docs; if your vendor doesn’t have an equivalent, that’s a lock-in signal.

3. What’s the receipt-numbering rule, and what happens to gaps?

For Malta, MTCA expects strictly monotonic, no-gaps, per-tenant numbering. The two failure modes are:

• “Our system reuses numbers if a sale was cancelled” → not compliant.
• “Our system auto-fills any gaps it sees” → not compliant, and a regulator who notices will wonder what else you’re quietly editing.

The right answer is “pre-allocated ranges, no gaps possible by design, and any anomaly is flagged for manual review rather than silently fixed.” See the MTCA checklist for the long version.

4. Where is my data, physically?

The question is about EU data residency. In 2026 there is one right answer if you’re serving Maltese or EU customers: eu-west, eu-central, or another EU region. Anything else exposes you to a GDPR review you don’t want.

“We are GDPR-compliant” is not the same as “your data is in the EU”. The first is a process claim; the second is a physical fact. Ask for the region. If the vendor doesn’t know, that’s the answer.

5. What’s the upgrade story, and what does it cost?

Software updates are not a feature. They are the baseline of running modern software. Every POS that’s been deployed for 24 months will have had at least one security patch you needed. The question is whether you paid extra for it.

VIND ships weekly. Updates are included in every tier. Major-version upgrades are included in every tier. We do not charge for security patches and we do not charge for “the new dashboard”. If your vendor mentions an “upgrade fee”, that’s a vendor designed for the 2008 software market.

6. What’s the support escalation, and who picks up?

Three levels matter:

• First-line — email or chat, business hours. Reasonable expectation: same-day response.
• Second-line — phone, business hours. For “the till is down and I have 40 covers tonight”.
• Emergency — outside business hours. For real outages.

Ask what each line costs. Ask if the second-line phone is a Maltese number or an Indian call centre at 02:00. Ask what the SLA is — “we’ll do our best” is not an SLA, “we respond within 15 minutes for tier-1 incidents” is.

7. What’s your honesty about features that aren’t quite ready?

This is the question we’d ask first.

Every vendor’s marketing page lists a feature inventory. Half of every page is in production; some is “coming soon”; some is, frankly, vapourware. The vendor that tells you which is which, unprompted, on the marketing page itself, is the vendor that will tell you the truth when you have a problem too.

We marked Peppol as beta because it is. We could have left it ambiguous. The day a customer hit the gap would be the day we lost the relationship. Marketing honesty is a leading indicator of post-sale honesty.

What VIND tries to be

We are not the cheapest POS in Malta. We are not the flashiest. We are the one that gives you the same answer to those seven questions in front of an inspector, a tired cashier, and a slow auditor. The product is built around the answers, not the demo.

If you’d like to put us through the seven questions: book a demo. Bring all seven.