A coffee shop's POS bill splits into two very different halves: a hardware purchase you pay once, and a software subscription you keep paying. Owners usually plan the second and forget the first — then discover the till has already eaten the quarter.
Here is the same maths, laid out as a budget instead of a buying guide.
The one-off half: what you actually buy
| Item | Price (VND) | Do you need it on day one? |
|---|---|---|
| Tablet (iPad 10th gen or Samsung Tab) | 8,000,000 - 12,000,000 | Yes — one per checkout station |
| Tablet stand / holder | 500,000 - 1,500,000 | Yes |
| Thermal receipt printer (80mm) | 1,500,000 - 3,000,000 | Yes |
| Cash drawer | 800,000 - 1,500,000 | Once the till starts to drift |
| Payment terminal (cards + QR) | 1,000,000 - 3,000,000 | When customers start asking to pay by card |
| Barcode scanner | 500,000 - 1,000,000 | Only if you sell packaged beans or merch |
| Kitchen display screen | 3,000,000 - 5,000,000 | Only when baristas are the bottleneck |
A tablet plus a printer gets you trading. The full list runs 15,000,000 - 40,000,000 VND; the small-shop version — tablet, printer, cash drawer — lands at 15,000,000 - 25,000,000 VND.
The order of spending matters more than the total. Buy the tablet and printer first, add the cash drawer when cash handling gets sloppy, and add the payment terminal when your customers start asking for MoMo, ZaloPay or VietQR rather than when a vendor brochure tells you to.
The recurring half: software by shop size
| Shop profile | Software per month | What the money buys |
|---|---|---|
| Solo cafe, 1 barista, 30-50 orders/day | 0 — free plan (Loyverse or Square) | Nothing yet; you are still testing the concept |
| Small cafe, 2-3 baristas | From 200,000 (KiotViet) | Ingredient cost per drink, more than one login |
| Medium cafe, 4+ baristas, ~100 customers/day | From 300,000 (Sapo POS) | Delivery-platform orders, staff accounts, a menu that may grow into food |
| Chain, 3+ locations | 300,000 - 500,000 | Centralised management and analytics across branches |
The jump from free to paid is not really about order volume. It happens when you need two things a cash notebook cannot give you: ingredient cost per drink, and sales data you can act on.
Why the subscription looks cheap next to the waste
Run the numbers on a shop doing 100 customers a day at a 45,000 VND average ticket: 4,500,000 VND a day, or 135,000,000 VND a month.
Software at 300,000 - 500,000 VND a month is under 0.4% of revenue. Set that against a 10-15% waste reduction from ingredient-level tracking and the subscription is not the expense worth arguing about — the untracked milk, syrup and beans are.
The part owners miss: who owns the history
Cloud POS handles backups of the vendor's copy. That is not the same as owning your own history.
The reports your weekly review runs on — sales by day, ingredient usage against sales, waste, payment-method mix, e-invoice files — only pay off as history. This rainy season against last year's. Peak hours this year against last. Subscription plans rarely let you reach that far back, and the history lives inside the vendor's account. Change software, let a payment lapse, or lose the login, and the years go with it.
Two habits fix that cheaply:
- Export monthly. Sales by day, ingredient usage, waste, payment mix. Keep the files outside the vendor account.
- Keep a copy off the counter tablet. An offline POS is the extreme version of this problem — everything sits on the one tablet at the till.
Before buying storage for those exports, check two things: whether the plan is genuinely one-time or renews at a higher price, and whether the space is sized for years of exports and shop photos, which fill storage far faster than spreadsheets do.
Setup: what to expect on the clock
- Menu configuration, payments and testing: 2-4 hours
- Staff training: one session of 2-3 hours — ask for it, it is included in the subscription
- Fully operational: 1-2 days
Set the menu up properly the first time. Prices should run at least 3-4x ingredient cost, and Vietnam's VAT on food and beverage is typically 8% (reduced from 10%), so configure it before you take your first order rather than after.
Five mistakes that show up on the bill
- Choosing on price alone — the cheapest option often costs more in six months.
- Skipping training — staff errors are the most expensive line nobody budgets for.
- No backup habit — cloud covers the vendor, not you; offline covers nobody.
- Ignoring delivery integrations — manual re-entry of GrabFood or ShopeeFood orders during a rush is where overselling starts.
- Over-complicating the menu — a POS with 200 modifiers is slower than a simple one if baristas cannot find the buttons.
The weekly 15 minutes
Set aside 15-20 minutes a week to read what the system already records: best sellers, peak hours, ingredient usage versus sales, items that sell together, payment-method mix. That review is what turns a POS from a receipt printer into a pricing tool.
This article was originally published on Tân IT365 — the full guide covers hardware selection, software comparison and menu setup in more detail.
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