How to choose a POS for a Saudi shop or restaurant

A point of sale system is more than a till. It records every sale, prints or sends the receipt, tracks how the customer paid and gives you totals at the end of the day. In Saudi Arabia it also has to produce the simplified tax invoice for each consumer sale, so the till and your tax compliance become one system.

That is why a POS decision is rarely only about screens and hardware. A cafe owner, a grocery cashier and a salon receptionist each need a different speed and layout, but all of them need the same foundations: correct VAT, Arabic output, a reliable closing routine and a way to report invoices to ZATCA as the rules require.

Every receipt you give a consumer is a simplified tax invoice, so it must be electronic, cannot be edited or deleted once issued, and must carry a QR code. These requirements have applied since e-invoicing Phase 1 began in December 2021. A POS that prints a plain till slip without the QR code is not enough.

Phase 2 adds integration: simplified invoices are issued to the customer first and reported to ZATCA within 24 hours, in waves based on taxpayer revenue that ZATCA announces in advance. Ask any vendor whether the POS supports Phase 2, how onboarding works and what happens to invoices that fail to report. Check ZATCA's latest announcements and your accountant before you decide.

• Does every receipt carry the QR code and the VAT amount?
• Is Phase 2 supported, and who performs the onboarding with ZATCA?
• Can a sale be edited after issue, or only corrected with a credit note?
• What happens to an invoice that could not be reported on time?

Look at the cashier screen first, because staff use it all day. It should run right to left in Arabic, let a cashier find a product by scanning its barcode or searching the catalogue, and keep the next action obvious. Test it with your least experienced cashier, not with the vendor's demonstrator.

Then look at the output. Receipts should print in clear Arabic, with an English line where foreign customers need it, and show the VAT, the QR code and the seller details. A catalogue with price lists helps when the same item has different prices, for example dine-in and takeaway menus at a restaurant. These details are what your customers and your accountant actually see.

Real counters are messy. A table of six splits the bill three ways, a customer pays part in cash and the rest by card, or a salon client settles a service in two stages. Your POS should record split and partial payments cleanly, so each sale shows how it was paid and what is still outstanding.

Daily session closing is the other test. At the end of a shift the cashier should close the session and compare the system totals with the cash in the drawer and the card payments, leaving a record of any difference. A POS that makes this slow or unclear will be skipped by busy staff, and you lose the daily control that makes a POS worth having.

Shops lose their connection for a few minutes now and then, and a queue at the till cannot wait for the network, so you need a system that does not stop working at the first drop. Choose a POS that keeps selling through short drops and sends the pending information once the connection returns, rather than freezing the screen or forcing the cashier to write sales on paper.

Test this yourself during the trial: disconnect the network, sell a few items, reconnect and check that the receipts, the totals and the reports match. Remember that simplified invoices must be reported to ZATCA within 24 hours under Phase 2, so a short outage is manageable but one that lasts days needs a plan.

Shortlist two or three options and run the same real day through each: open a session, sell ten items by scanning, split one payment, issue a refund as a credit note, print an Arabic receipt and close the session. A restaurant should also test a busy hour, a grocery fast scanning, a salon service pricing. Compare how long each step takes.

Fatooraz includes a POS in its Business plan, built for simplified invoices with QR codes, Arabic receipts and daily session closing, and the free trial lets you test a full shift without a credit card. Whichever product you pick, keep your accountant in the loop, since your invoicing setup affects your VAT records, and testing before you commit costs less than changing systems later.

• The cashier screen works in Arabic and a new employee can sell without help
• Split and partial payments are recorded correctly
• Daily closing shows cash and card totals clearly
• Receipts carry Arabic text, VAT details and the QR code
• Sales continue through a short connection drop