How to Choose the Best EPOS System for a Cake Shop or Bakery

8 Sept

Looking for the best EPOS system for your cake shop or bakery? Learn which features matter, what costs to compare and how to choose the right bakery POS system.

Choosing an EPOS system for a bakery sounds simple at first. You need a till, a card machine, a way to record sales and perhaps a receipt printer. For a small bakery selling coffee, pastries, bread and cupcakes over the counter, that may be enough.

But cake shops often work very differently.

Imagine two customers walking into the same bakery. The first chooses two cupcakes and pays £8.50 at the counter. The whole transaction takes less than two minutes.

The second customer wants a bespoke birthday cake for four weeks' time. They need to choose the size, sponge flavour, filling, colours, theme and design. They show you a photograph from Instagram, request personalised wording, agree a collection date and pay a deposit today. The remaining balance will be paid closer to collection.

Both customers are buying from the same business, but the operational requirements are completely different.

This is why choosing the best EPOS system for a cake shop or bakeryshould not start with the card terminal. It should start with understanding how your bakery actually receives, manages and fulfils orders.

For some businesses, a general EPOS system will be more than enough. For others, especially bespoke cake shops, the bigger question is whether you need a traditional EPOS at all, or whether you need a wider bakery management platform that also includes point-of-sale and payment capabilities.

What does an EPOS system actually do?

EPOS stands for Electronic Point of Sale. Traditionally, it described the combination of software and hardware used to process transactions in a shop. That could include a touchscreen till, cash drawer, receipt printer and card terminal.

Modern EPOS platforms can do far more. Many now include stock control, customer records, staff permissions, online ordering, loyalty programmes, analytics and integrations with accounting platforms.

For a bakery owner, that means the EPOS is no longer just the place where money is taken. It can become one of the central systems used to run the business.

The challenge is that many EPOS systems are designed for a wide range of industries. The same software may be used by a café, clothing retailer, restaurant, salon and bakery.

That flexibility is useful, but it can also mean that some of the things that matter most to a cake shop are treated as secondary features or have to be managed through workarounds.

Start by understanding what kind of bakery you operate

Before comparing providers, be clear about your business model.

A busy bakery café might process hundreds of relatively simple transactions each day. Speed at the counter matters. Staff need to find products quickly, take payment efficiently and move to the next customer.

A bespoke cake shop is different. A large proportion of the business may come from future orders rather than immediate purchases. Customers may book several weeks in advance, pay deposits and change details after the original order has been created.

Some bakeries operate both models at once. They may sell pastries, cupcakes and drinks to walk-in customers while also producing celebration cakes, wedding cakes and large personalised orders.

If that sounds like your business, your EPOS needs to handle both fast retail and complex future orders without forcing your team to maintain separate systems.

That is the first buying decision to make.

Think about the entire cake-order journey

A standard retail transaction usually ends when the payment is completed.

A bespoke cake order often begins there.

The customer might place the order in September for a cake needed in October. Between those dates, your bakery may need to confirm a design, order a topper, change a colour, collect the remaining balance, prepare the cake and notify the customer when it is ready.

A good bakery system should therefore help your team understand what needs to happen next.

When you open the system on a Monday morning, can you easily see what cakes are being collected that week?
Can you identify which orders still have outstanding balances?
Can your decorators find the design information without searching through WhatsApp?

These questions are much more important than whether the system has a particularly attractive touchscreen.

Make sure future orders are easy to manage

Future orders are one of the biggest differences between a bakery and many other retail businesses.

Suppose a customer orders a cake today for collection in five weeks. Your system should make that order easy to find throughout the five-week period. You should ideally be able to search by customer name, order number, mobile number or collection date. You should be able to change the collection date without creating an entirely new order.

A useful system should also help your team see the future workload.

For example, if Saturday already has twenty bespoke cake collections, your staff should know that before accepting another complicated order.

That kind of operational visibility can be much more valuable than a simple daily sales report.

Check how well it handles custom cake specifications

Many EPOS platforms offer product variants and modifiers. These are useful for simple choices.

A coffee shop might use them for:

Large or small.
Oat milk or dairy milk.
Vanilla or caramel syrup.

A cake shop can use the same idea for flavours and sizes, but bespoke cakes often require considerably more detail.

You may need to record the cake size, shape, sponge flavour, filling, finish, colour palette, theme, personalised wording, topper, decorations and special instructions. The best way to test a system is to create one of your actual complicated orders during the demo.

Don't let the provider show you how to sell a croissant. Ask them to create an eight-inch chocolate cake with chocolate ganache, lavender buttercream, gold detailing, a custom topper and specific personalised wording for collection three weeks later.

If the process feels complicated during a calm software demonstration, imagine what it will feel like when your shop is busy.

Reference images matter more than many people realise

Cake customers often communicate through photographs. They send screenshots from Instagram, Pinterest or TikTok and say, “I want something like this.” Those photographs are part of the order specification. If the order details sit inside the EPOS but the design photograph remains on someone's phone, your bakery still has two separate systems.

The best workflow keeps the important design information connected with the order. Your decorator should not have to ask which member of staff has the original photograph or search through three weeks of WhatsApp conversations.

The more bespoke your cakes are, the more important this becomes.

Deposits and part-payments should be simple

Cake businesses commonly take deposits. A customer might order a £160 cake and pay £50 today. The remaining £110 may be due a few days before collection. Your EPOS should make the financial position of that order immediately clear. Staff should be able to see the total order value, what has already been paid and what remains outstanding.

This becomes particularly important at collection time. If several customers arrive at once, your employee should not need to open bank statements or ask the manager whether someone has paid. The order should clearly show whether it is paid in full or whether a balance is still due.

When comparing providers, ask them to demonstrate the full deposit journey rather than simply saying, “Yes, we support deposits.” The way that feature actually works matters.

Don't choose an EPOS based only on the card machine

Payment hardware is important, but it should not dominate the decision.

Your customers may want to pay in several different ways. Some will pay by card at the counter. Others may need a payment link because they are placing the order over the phone or through social media.

You may also want to support online payments, digital wallets or cash. The important question is whether those payments stay connected to the order. If the customer pays a deposit through one system, the balance through another and the cake order lives somewhere else, your team still has to reconcile everything manually.

The best setup reduces the number of times information has to be copied between systems.

Look at the total cost, not the advertised price

EPOS providers often advertise attractive headline prices.

You might see low-cost hardware, free software or a relatively small monthly fee. But the true cost can include much more. There may be card-processing fees, software subscriptions, loyalty modules, online-ordering fees, additional terminals, staff-management features, customer-marketing tools, support packages and extra charges for additional locations.

A system that looks inexpensive at the beginning can become significantly more expensive as you add features. Before choosing a provider, calculate what it is likely to cost your bakery over the first twelve months. Then consider what happens when your transaction volume increases.

A small difference in payment fees may not matter when the bakery is taking £5,000 per month. At £50,000 per month, it becomes much more significant. The best value system is therefore not necessarily the one with the lowest upfront hardware price.

Your customer database can be more valuable than your till

Many bakery owners think of EPOS primarily as a way to process sales. But customer information can become even more valuable over time. Imagine your bakery processes thousands of orders over several years. If every transaction is anonymous, you may know exactly how much revenue you generated but very little about the people who generated it.

You may not know who your most valuable customers are, who regularly returns, who has stopped ordering or who referred new customers. For a celebration-cake business, customer history has even more potential.

You might know that Sarah ordered an eight-inch chocolate cake last September for her daughter's birthday. If Sarah returns this year, your team could potentially see the previous cake and make reordering easier. That creates a much better experience than treating her like a completely new customer.

This is why customer profiles should be treated as a core feature rather than an optional extra.

Think about the occasion as well as the transaction

Cake shops have an unusual advantage compared with many other retailers.

Your customers often tell you exactly why they are buying.

A birthday.
An anniversary.
A graduation.
A baby shower.
A wedding.

Those occasions can be commercially valuable because many of them repeat.

A normal EPOS might tell you that a customer bought a cake on 17 September. A bakery-focused system could potentially tell you that the customer's daughter's birthday is on 18 September.

That distinction matters.
The purchase happened once.
The birthday happens every year.

If your business has the appropriate customer relationship and marketing permissions, that information could eventually help you send useful reminders before the next occasion.

This can turn your customer database into an important repeat-order tool rather than simply a list of names.

Consider how loyalty fits into your business

Most modern EPOS providers now offer some form of customer loyalty functionality. That can be useful, but the programme needs to suit the way cake shops operate.

A traditional coffee-shop loyalty card might say, “Buy nine coffees and get the tenth free.”

That makes sense when a customer buys coffee several times a week. It makes less sense for someone ordering two £100 celebration cakes each year. Cake shops may benefit more from loyalty based on customer spend, birthday rewards, referrals, VIP benefits or future occasion reminders. When comparing EPOS platforms, ask how flexible the loyalty system is.

You want to avoid forcing your business into a loyalty model designed primarily for cafés or fast retail.

Inventory can mean different things to different providers

Almost every EPOS system advertises stock management. But cake shops need to look more closely at what that actually means. A simple retail stock system might know you have twelve bottles of water left. A bakery may want to know whether producing a chocolate cake affects the stock of flour, eggs, butter and chocolate.

Some systems can manage recipe-level inventory, while others mainly track finished products. Not every bakery needs complex ingredient stock control. A smaller bespoke cake business may prefer to manage inventory separately.

The important thing is understanding the difference before paying for a feature that doesn't actually solve your problem.

Online and in-store orders should not become separate businesses

Customers now discover bakeries through many channels.

Some walk into the shop.
Others order from the website.
Some telephone.
Others start the conversation through Instagram or WhatsApp.

Your team should not have to check multiple systems every morning to understand what needs to be prepared. If online ordering is important to your bakery, ask whether those orders appear alongside in-store orders. A customer ordering online and a customer ordering at the counter should ideally become part of the same operational view. This is particularly important as your bakery grows.

The more sales channels you add, the harder it becomes to manage them manually.

Good reporting should help you make decisions

Most EPOS systems can tell you your sales total. That is useful, but it is only the beginning. A bakery owner may also want to understand average order value, bestselling cake sizes, most popular flavours, busiest collection days and performance by location.

Over time, customer reporting becomes increasingly useful too.

How much revenue is coming from repeat customers?
Which customers spend most?
Which cake categories are growing?
Which promotions actually generated profitable orders?
Which customers have stopped buying?

Good reporting should help you decide what to do next. A dashboard full of charts is not valuable unless the information leads to better decisions.

Think about future locations now

Even if you only have one bakery today, you may eventually open another. Changing your entire EPOS platform after opening several locations can be disruptive and expensive. If expansion is part of your plan, ask how the system handles multiple shops.

Can you see every location from one dashboard?
Can you compare sales?
Can staff have different permissions?
Can a customer order in one branch and collect from another?

You should also consider whether customer history works across all locations. A loyal customer should ideally feel like a customer of your brand rather than a stranger every time they visit another branch.

Make sure the bakery can still operate when the internet goes down

Cloud-based systems offer many advantages, but they depend heavily on connectivity. Ask the provider what happens if your broadband fails during Saturday morning service.

Can you still take card payments?
Can you still access product information?
Can you still create orders?
How are offline transactions processed when the internet returns?

This might not seem important during a sales demo, but it becomes extremely important when customers are waiting at the counter.

Staff access should grow with the business

When the owner is the only person using the system, access control doesn't matter much.

Once the bakery has several employees, it becomes important.

A counter employee may need to take orders and payments.
A decorator may need to view cake specifications.
A manager may need access to sales and staff reports.
The owner may need everything.

The EPOS should allow you to control these permissions appropriately. It can also help you understand who processed a refund, changed a price or edited an order. That becomes more important as the business grows.

Accounting integration can save time

Your bakery EPOS should ideally connect smoothly with the financial side of the business. If your accountant uses Xero, QuickBooks or another accounting platform, check whether the system integrates with it. The goal is to avoid repeatedly entering the same information. The more manual data entry you remove, the more time your team has for productive work.

It's also worth asking your accountant which EPOS systems they already work with before you make a final decision.

Don't forget to ask who owns your data

This is one of the least exciting questions during an EPOS demonstration, but it can become one of the most important later.

If you decide to change provider in three years, can you export your customer records?

Can you export your sales history?
Can you export order information?
What format is provided?

If you have built a valuable database of thousands of customers, you do not want to discover that moving it elsewhere is extremely difficult. Ask about data export before you sign the contract.

Customer support matters more than most features when something goes wrong

An EPOS system becomes central to your business very quickly. If it stops working on a busy Saturday, you need to know who will help. Look beyond the phrase “customer support.”

Ask whether support is available by telephone, chat or email. Check whether weekend support is included and whether you have to pay extra for priority assistance.

Also ask about onboarding.

Will someone help you configure products and prices?
Will they help migrate information from your old system?
Will staff receive training?

A slightly more expensive platform with excellent support can sometimes be better value than cheaper software that leaves your team solving problems alone.

Why a generic EPOS can become limiting for bespoke cake shops

Generic EPOS systems have improved enormously. For many bakeries, they may be all that is needed. The challenge comes when bespoke cake orders become a large part of the business.

You might start using the EPOS for payments but keep cake details in a paper order book. Reference images remain on WhatsApp. Production planning happens in a spreadsheet. Loyalty is managed somewhere else. Customer marketing uses another platform.

At that point, the EPOS is only handling one small part of the business. The bakery may appear digital, but the underlying workflow is still fragmented. This is where specialist bakery technology starts to become more interesting.

Where Tolloz fits into the picture

Tolloz is being built from a different starting point. Instead of asking how a generic till system can be adapted for bakeries, the starting question is:

How does a cake shop actually manage a customer from the first enquiry through to the next order?

That means thinking about more than the payment.

The customer record matters.
The cake specification matters.
Reference images matter.
Collection dates matter.
Deposits and balances matter.
Order communication matters.
Loyalty matters.
Customer history matters.

The aim of Tolloz is to bring more of those elements into one cloud-based platform created specifically for cake shops and bakeries. Instead of viewing a customer only as a card transaction, the system is being designed around the relationship between the customer and their order.

Imagine opening a record and seeing that Sarah ordered an eight-inch chocolate cake for her daughter's birthday last September, that she paid £120 and that she has ordered from you three times previously.

That is a much richer view of the customer than a simple till receipt.

Test the EPOS with your real bakery before you buy

The best way to evaluate an EPOS is not to watch the provider's ideal demonstration.

Ask them to show you your real situations.
Ask them to process a quick cupcake sale.
Then ask them to create a bespoke cake for next month.
Ask them to take a deposit.
Ask them to change the design.
Ask them to find the order by collection date.
Ask them to show what happens when the customer returns next year.
Ask how the system handles the reference image.
Ask how your production team sees what needs to be made.

If the provider can demonstrate those situations comfortably, the system is probably much closer to what your bakery needs. If everything requires a workaround, that is useful information too.

The best EPOS is the one that fits how your bakery works

The biggest mistake is choosing an EPOS purely because it is popular.

A system can be excellent and still be wrong for your business.
A high-volume bakery café may need lightning-fast counter sales, simple stock control and reliable payments.
A bespoke cake shop may care far more about future orders, deposits, design specifications, customer history and repeat business.
A growing bakery with several locations may need central reporting and staff permissions.

The right EPOS should support the way you work today while giving you room to grow.

It should reduce administration rather than create more of it.
It should give your team clearer information.
It should make the customer experience easier.

And most importantly, it should help you run the bakery as a business, not simply operate a till.

Rise by Tolloz provides practical advice to help bakery and cake shop owners build better organised, more profitable businesses. And Tolloz is being built around a simple idea:

A cake shop should not need six disconnected systems to manage one customer order.

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Frequently asked questions about bakery EPOS systems

What is the best EPOS system for a bakery?
There is no single best EPOS for every bakery. A high-volume bakery café may prioritise fast checkout, menu management and inventory, while a bespoke cake shop may need stronger future-order management, deposits, customer records and collection scheduling. Compare systems based on your actual workflow rather than brand popularity alone.
What is the difference between POS and EPOS?
POS means point of sale. EPOS traditionally refers to an electronic point-of-sale system combining software with payment and till hardware. Today the terms POS and EPOS are often used interchangeably when describing modern cloud-based sales systems.
What features should a cake shop EPOS have?
A cake shop should consider payments, future orders, deposits, customer profiles, cake specifications, collection and delivery scheduling, loyalty, reporting and integration with other business systems. Bespoke cake businesses should pay particular attention to whether the system can manage complex orders rather than only standard products.
Can an EPOS system manage cake deposits?
Some systems support deposits, split payments, partial payments or similar workflows, but the implementation varies considerably. Ask the provider to demonstrate a real example where a customer pays a deposit today and the remaining balance several weeks later.
Can I run a bakery EPOS on an iPad or tablet?
Many modern cloud POS platforms support tablets or mobile hardware. The right configuration depends on your chosen provider and whether you need additional equipment such as printers, cash drawers or customer displays.
Does a bakery need a receipt printer?
Not necessarily. Many modern systems can issue digital receipts by email or SMS. Whether you keep a printer depends on your customers, operating model and record-keeping requirements.
Should my EPOS include a loyalty programme?
If repeat customers are important to your business, connecting loyalty to your customer and transaction history can be valuable. However, the programme needs to suit how often your customers buy. Celebration-cake businesses may benefit more from spend-based rewards and occasion-led retention than a traditional stamp card.
Should I choose an EPOS based on card transaction fees?
Transaction fees matter, particularly at higher sales volumes, but they shouldn't be the only consideration. Compare the total cost of software, hardware, payments, integrations, loyalty, support and any additional modules alongside the operational benefits.
Do I need a bakery-specific EPOS?
Not every bakery does. A simple bakery selling mostly standard products may be perfectly well served by a general POS platform. Bakery-specific software becomes more attractive when bespoke orders, deposits, future collections, customer occasions, order history and production workflows become central to the business.

Rise by Tolloz provides practical advice to help bakeries and cake shops build better organised, more profitable businesses.