Hi! I fully understand your needs. As a restaurantner before I had my fair share of rocky roads in the POS machine beginning many years ago from cash register. I learnt the hard and rocky way that the quoted price is seldom the true indications of cost.Belief Me as the nightmare begins after THE PURCHASE. As I have changed or had numerous issues along the path. THe cost involve is not only in the list of quotes but also involves many others which I'm sure your boss will understand if he had been thru the operations or come from rank and file. Imagine of a peak time when your system hang not once but numerous times. Stand inside the cashier and look at what your customer going to do if you know what I mean. In food industry when you lose a customer you lose it forever and news may even spread. And worst to come when I had a replacement and all the former data cannot be reuse for technical analysis in the new POS.

Let me give you a very brief summary of the bad situations.
Expensive branded POS - Expensive to buy, expensive upgrades of hardware, updates of software and expensive maintenance
Cheap POS - Expensive downtime, Opportunity cost, customer dissatisfaction, supplier instability and expensive data lost
Self Develop - Expensive programmer maintenance, waste of time & money when you rebuild or restudy by new programmer
Retail Pos - Unable to go in detail in monitoring stocks or full operations competency. Expensive data waste
Open source or free software - unsure future, data continuity, unprooven in operation, opportunity cost to change.
Hardware - Proprietory, parts avaibility & cost. Some parts can be damn expensive.

When I do a purchase I will take into account to avoid future data problems and expensive time & cost of replacement,

1)Ease of use and training
2)Product stability & Experience
3)Support strength & skills
4)Company experience, professionalism, focus and stability
5)Hardware replacement parts availabilty period & cost
6)Able to report my major business analysis with accuracy
7)Do proper research rather than listening to the salesman
8)Lastly the quoted price as this is the least expensive considering the hassle of replacement

Hope that you can benefit from my past experienced. There is no perfect system or cheap system but at least we must not buy blindly with no define requirement. When I start a business usually I will stick to cash register until I can afford and have done enough research before I take major step in computerised data.

Ofcourse all the salesperson will beg to differ and pprovide tonnes of excuses. . :-)

This post has been edited by rgck: Oct 15 2008, 02:15 PM