What counts as the POS, and what counts as the ordering platform?
The POS, or point of sale, is the system that rings up a sale at the counter: the terminal, the cash drawer, the printers, and the reports your bookkeeper opens on Monday. Toast, Square for Restaurants, Clover, Lightspeed and Revel are common ones. The ordering platform is what a diner uses when they are not standing in front of you, whether that is your own site or a delivery marketplace.
Left alone, these two systems know nothing about each other. Integration is the wire between them. The word gets used loosely, so the useful question is never "is it integrated" but "which direction does the data move, and how often".
What actually moves between the two systems?
Three separate flows. Vendors sell all three under one word, so check them one at a time.
| Direction | What moves | What it saves | Without it |
|---|---|---|---|
| POS to ordering site | Item names, prices, categories, modifiers, tax rates | You maintain one menu instead of two. A price change at the counter reaches the website the same day. | Staff update the POS and forget the site, so a diner pays last spring price and the manager eats the difference. |
| Ordering site to POS | The order itself: items, modifiers, guest name, pickup time, payment status, tip | No one retypes a ticket during a rush. Sales land in the same reports as counter sales. | A cashier keys online orders by hand, adding roughly a minute each and a typo rate you can taste. |
| POS to ordering site, live | Stock counts and 86 status | When the kitchen 86s an item at the counter, it disappears online in seconds. | Diners keep buying an item that ran out at 6pm, and every one of those is a refund and an apology. |
Why does this matter to the money?
The saving is not glamorous, which is why it gets skipped. Hand keying an online ticket takes roughly a minute of a paid person's time, and it happens at exactly the moment that person is most expensive to interrupt. Fifty online orders a week is close to an hour of labor spent retyping information a computer already has.
The larger number is the errors. A stale online menu sells an item the kitchen ran out of at six, and every one of those ends as a refund, a remake or a diner who does not come back. A mistyped modifier ends the same way. These losses never appear on a line item in your P and L, so they get treated as the cost of being busy.
There is also a reporting argument. When online sales post through the POS, your item level reports, labor reports and daily close include every channel. When they do not, you are running the business on two sets of books and reconciling them by hand.
What breaks when an integration is only half done?
A connection that passes a demo can still fail on a Saturday. These four failures account for most of it, and all four are testable before you sign.
Modifiers flatten
The item arrives but "no onions, extra tahini, sauce on side" lands as a single line of free text the cook has to read mid rush, or vanishes entirely. Test this with your ugliest real order before you sign.
Item mapping drifts
Every integration maps an online item to a POS item by an internal ID. Add a dish at the counter without mapping it and the order fails silently or posts to a miscellaneous bucket that wrecks your item level reporting.
Tax and tips post to the wrong place
Online tax rates can differ from counter rates for delivery addresses, and tips need to reach the same tip pool as in store tips. Get both wrong and your daily close never balances, which is how most owners discover the integration is half done.
Discounts do not translate
A comp, a loyalty reward or a staff meal exists as a specific discount code in the POS. If the ordering platform sends a raw dollar reduction instead, the reason code is lost and your promotion reporting is guesswork.
Two things owners believe that are not true
"Integrated means the systems are always in sync." Many integrations poll on a schedule rather than pushing instantly, so a price change can take minutes or a full sync cycle to appear. Ask for the interval in minutes, and ask specifically whether 86 status is real time, because that is the one where the delay costs you a refund.
"My POS vendor's own online ordering will always integrate best." Usually true on the wiring, often false on the economics and the storefront. A POS built ordering module is tightly connected because it is the same company, but it may still charge per order, and it is rarely the strongest customer facing site. Compare the connection and the commercial terms as two separate decisions.
How does Zayos handle it?
Zayos routes orders through Otter, the kitchen tablet platform, which covers 25 or more POS systems, so a restaurant gets one integration layer instead of one connection per channel. One POS integration is included on every Operator tier at $499 per location per month, and menu mapping happens during onboarding rather than being handed to the restaurant. Most restaurants are live in under two weeks.
Going deeper: the POS integration guide lists how each specific system connects, how Otter integration works covers the tablet layer, and the integrations page lists what Zayos connects to today.