Stop Asking How Much It Costs

The number on the quote is the one figure that won’t tell you what an EPOS actually costs you.

When operators start looking at EPOS systems, nearly everyone leads with the same question: how much is it? It’s a fair question. It’s also, most of the time, the wrong one to lead with, because the price on the quote is the single figure that tells you least about what the thing will actually cost you.

Two kinds of cost

There’s the price you pay for a system. And there’s the price you pay when it doesn’t work the way your business needs it to. The first one is printed on the quote in a nice big font. The second one is never printed anywhere, which is convenient for everyone except you, because it’s almost always the larger of the two

The second cost is the slow order flow that adds thirty seconds to every transaction on a rammed Friday. It’s the report that doesn’t answer the question you actually ask on a Monday morning. It’s the terminal that picks your busiest night to fall over. None of that is on the quote, and all of it comes out of your takings, every week you own the wrong system.

Where the cheap ones get you back

This is worth knowing, because a low headline price is often a low headline price by design. Plenty of providers price the software cheap at the front and quietly make it up elsewhere: in the margin on your card payments, in charges for extra users or sites, in “optional” support that turns out to be nothing of the sort the moment you’re live and something breaks.

Add it all up over three years and the cheap system regularly turns out dearer than the one that looked pricey on day one. 

The question that actually works

So there’s one question that cuts through all of it, and it’s worth asking every provider you talk to. Not “how much a month?” but: show me the full cost of ownership over 36 months. All of it. Software, hardware, payment processing fees, integrations, support, and any per-site or per-user charges. Put those numbers side by side and the picture changes completely, often in favour of the option that looked more expensive at a glance.

A provider who can hand you that breakdown without flinching is telling you something good. One who suddenly needs to “circle back” on the numbers is also telling you something, just before you’ve signed anything, which is the best possible time to find out. Price is what you pay. Value is what runs your business. Only one of those two fits on a quote, and it’s not the one that matters. 

Ask Truli for a full 36-month cost of ownership, itemised, so you can compare like with like.

truli.co.uk  |  01580 231 880