This buyer's guide's aim is to help you step by step to determine if your business would be better suited to an Electronic Cash Register (ECR) or POS (Point of Sale) machine.

If your business is cash only or most of the clientele pays in cash go with an ECR, as it's designed to store cash and print paper receipts. Most if not all ECR’s on the market have terminals attached to the ECR to accept card payments as well as touchless payment.

If the majority of the business is run on card or NFC payments then we recommend you choose a POS system. Also if you're business is at a stall, in a food truck or market then POS system's are more portable and easier to set up. 

What kind of relationship do you have with your customers is it:

If your aim is to communicate more frequently in a digital format or charge your customers a recurring fee? If yes POS's give you these options and should be your go to over an ECR.

ECR's are usually a one off purchase, whereas a POS is often a rental or one off fee + they charge a % of your sales, unfortunately taking any kind of credit, debit or mobile payment will come with some kind of fee it is unavoidable.

There are memory limitations to product prices on the price look up functions that come with most ECR’s where POS systems have the advantage with cloud storage. If your business offers more than several 2000 products then a POS system is likely the way to go.

Even the most basic ECR’s have features that allow separate ID’s for each employee to sign in with. POS systems in general do have more features regarding employee management where there is software with ID hardware or sign-ins that keeps track of sales that every employee processes.

There are 4 major producers of ECR’s that will be covered, there may be local or regional producers of ECR, but for the scope of this article we’ll only be covering the biggest producers. 

Main Producers of ECR’s are:

Tiers by Features, the higher the Tier, the more features or stronger the features will come with the ECR

-Lockbox for cash
-Keyboard with programmable keys
-Thermal Printer
-Price Lookups
-Accounting Journal
-Clerk IDs
-Displays for clerk and customer