What happens when a venue's point of sale goes down?

Trading stops, unless it was planned for. Orders cannot be taken, cards cannot be processed and the kitchen stops receiving dockets. Three things prevent that becoming a lost night: an automatic failover connection, a point of sale that works offline, and a written manual fallback the staff have actually seen.

The reason this matters more in hospitality than almost anywhere is timing. Outages do not respect your trading pattern, and the hours when a failure costs most are precisely the hours when least help is available: Friday and Saturday evenings, public holidays, the function you have been preparing for. There is no option to pause and sort it out, because there is a room full of people who ordered forty minutes ago.

The first answer is a failover connection, and for a venue it is inexpensive relative to what it protects. A router with automatic mobile broadband backup covers most outages, and it protects the point of sale and the payment terminals together since both usually run over the same link. Two requirements: it must switch automatically, because nobody is reconfiguring a router mid-service, and it must have been tested, because untested failover reveals an expired SIM at the worst moment.

The second is offline capability in the point of sale itself, and this is a procurement question you should settle before choosing a platform rather than after. Some cloud systems keep taking orders when the connection drops and sync when it returns. Some allow payments to be recorded and reconciled later. Some simply stop. Establish exactly which yours does by testing it deliberately in a quiet period, because the marketing claim and the behaviour are not always the same thing.

Payments need their own answer because they are the part customers notice most. A card terminal with mobile connectivity as a fallback keeps payments working when the fixed line is down, and for most venues that single piece of equipment is the difference between an awkward evening and a night of unpaid tabs. Know also what your process is if terminals fail entirely, because that conversation with a queue of customers is much better had from a plan than from first principles.

The third answer costs nothing and is the one venues skip: a written manual fallback. Which order pad, where it is kept, how prices are established without the screen, how payment is taken, how the kitchen gets orders, and how everything is entered afterwards. One page, laminated, kept where the duty manager can find it, and walked through with staff so it is not the first time they have seen it. Front-of-house staff mid-service cannot invent a process, and expecting them to is how a technical problem becomes a bad night.

Practise it in a quiet period, which sounds excessive and takes twenty minutes. Run a Tuesday afternoon as though the system were down, and the exercise reliably finds the gaps: nobody knows where the pads are, the prices on the printed list are eighteen months old, the eftpos backup has never been tested. Finding that on a quiet Tuesday costs nothing and finding it on a Saturday costs the night.

For multi-venue operators the plan needs to work per site rather than centrally, since an outage usually affects one location while the others trade normally. That means each venue has its own failover, its own fallback documentation and its own duty manager who knows both, rather than a head office arrangement that assumes someone can be reached. Karidis operates across Adelaide and Melbourne sites and rebuilt infrastructure to 99.99% uptime, which is the kind of target that only means anything when it is designed per site.

Ransomware deserves mention alongside connectivity because it produces the same operational result and lasts far longer. A venue whose systems are encrypted has lost its point of sale, its bookings and its records simultaneously, and recovery is measured in days rather than minutes. Karidis rebuilt after a malware incident in 2023, reaching 100% Essential Eight compliance, which is what the recovery from that scenario actually looks like: not restoring the old arrangement but replacing it with one that would not fail the same way.

The honest caveats. None of this makes an outage pleasant; it makes it survivable. Some failures, a platform-wide outage at your point of sale vendor, are outside your control entirely and the only answer is the manual fallback. And resilience should be sized against what a night is worth to you rather than bought comprehensively, which for most venues means the failover connection and the written process first. If you want those set up before you need them, call 1800 456 567.