Choosing a POS: iiko, r_keeper or a Plain Tablet Till

01What a POS actually does

A POS is not a receipt printer with software. Its real work: open and close an order, send a ticket to the kitchen, hold the table's bill, close out the shift, deduct stock and write it all into reports. The receipt is only the most visible part.

That reframes the question. Not "which POS is best?" but "do I need stock control and tech cards?". If yes: iiko or r_keeper. If no: a tablet till is enough and you keep the money.

02iiko: the standard that works fully two-way

iiko is the cloud POS running in most mid-size and large restaurants in Uzbekistan. Its strength is stock, tech cards, costing, production and financial reporting — a system built for the chef and the accountant.

laCafe is fully two-way with iiko. The plugin runs inside iikoFront: an order from a QR, tablet, website or aggregator opens in iiko, lines get added, it is paid and closed. Receipts and kitchen tickets print on the same printers. Catalogs, prices and the stop-list come from iiko and refresh by webhook.

So replacing iiko is not on the table. You keep iiko and add a guest layer on top: a QR on the table, a website, the aggregators. Nothing happens to your accounting.

03r_keeper: classic, heavy, dependable

r_keeper is an old-school professional POS. Licence model, expensive and slow to install, a specialist needed to configure it. In exchange you get very dependable operation and logic proven in large chains.

laCafe talks to r_keeper over the RK7 XML API: the stop-list is polled every 30 seconds, orders every 10. Not instant like iiko, but enough in practice. Modifiers are not passed yet — that is planned, and we say so plainly.

04The third option: a tablet till and no POS at all

Does a 12-table cafe, a choyxona or a coffee shop need a stock module? Usually not. They buy at the bazaar once a day, keep the recipe in their head and judge stock by eye. Selling such a place a full POS is a needless expense.

Then laBoard is enough: a till tablet with a hall view and an order screen. It comes with the laCafe package at no extra cost. Orders from tablets, QR and laWaiter land in it.

To be fair, this option has a weak spot: laCafe runs in the cloud. If the internet drops, new orders wait until the connection returns. Where outages are frequent, add a backup 4G modem, or pick a till with an offline mode (iiko or r_keeper) and connect laCafe on top of it.

• You need stock, tech cards, production → iiko or r_keeper
• You only need orders, receipts, shifts and reports → the laBoard till tablet
• You have a POS but no guest channels → keep the POS and add a QR and a site on top
• The internet drops often → a till with an offline mode (iiko, r_keeper) plus a backup 4G modem

05Five questions to ask before choosing

First: what happens when the internet drops? If the answer is "it stops", that is a serious risk for a place on the city's edge. Second: whose data is it? Can you take your menu and customer base with you if you leave a cloud POS?

Third: fiscal requirements. If you plan to sell through aggregators, every dish needs an MXIK/IKPU code — does the system support that? Fourth: who supports you, and in which language. Fifth: total monthly cost — licence, hardware, service and per-order fees together.

One last piece of advice: don't replace a working POS just because another is "better". A replacement stops the business for a week and leaves two months of confusion. If the problem is on the guest side — QR, tablets, website — fix that side and leave the POS alone.