You’re going to be asked to sign a lot of IT contracts in the next eight weeks. EPOS, payments, broadband, CCTV, phones, music, bookings, email, WiFi, maybe a loyalty app somebody’s cousin built. Here’s the playbook so you don’t get fleeced.

I sit on the commercial side of a hospitality IT business in central London, which means I spend a lot of my week on the phone with first-time founders who have just realised that nobody warned them about any of this. Below is the conversation I usually end up having - condensed, opinionated, and aimed squarely at the person opening their first site.

The shopping list - and what actually matters on day one

Here’s everything you’ll be sold. I’ve split it into “you need this trading on day one” and “you can defer it without anyone dying”.

Day one, non-negotiable:

  • A working broadband line (ideally fibre) with the router actually plugged in
  • An EPOS system with menus loaded and staff trained
  • Card payment terminals that talk to the EPOS
  • A network - switch, access points, cabling - that keeps payments and the kitchen printers on a separate lane to guest WiFi
  • Guest WiFi that works without sharing your back-office network
  • Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for email and shared documents
  • Multi-factor authentication on every account that touches money or customer data
  • Endpoint protection on every laptop and back-office PC
  • Backups of your finance and rota data

Can wait a few weeks:

  • CCTV (get it scoped on day one, but it can be commissioned in the soft-launch week)
  • Music system and licensing (PPL/PRS - sort the licence before you open, the kit can wait)
  • Phone system - most new sites can run on mobiles or a single VoIP handset for the first month
  • Loyalty, gift cards, marketing automation, reservation widgets beyond your core booking platform
  • Staff scheduling software - useful, not load-bearing on day one
  • Digital menu boards, kitchen display systems if you’re not using them from open

The temptation is to buy everything at once because every vendor will tell you their thing is essential. It isn’t. Get the boring stuff right first.

Budgeting - rough ballparks for a single site

I’ll give ranges, because anyone quoting you a fixed number for a venue they haven’t seen is guessing. For a single-site casual dining restaurant in London, opening from a shell:

  • Cabling and comms cabinet: £3,000 to £8,000 depending on the size of the site and how much structured cabling the fit-out already includes
  • Network kit (firewall, switch, access points): £2,000 to £6,000 for prosumer or business-grade gear that will actually last
  • EPOS hardware and software: £4,000 to £15,000 upfront, plus £80 to £250 per till per month ongoing
  • Payment terminals: usually free hardware, but watch the transaction fees - see below
  • CCTV: £2,000 to £6,000 installed for a small venue
  • Microsoft 365: £10 to £25 per user per month
  • Cyber security tooling and managed support: £30 to £100 per user per month for a properly managed service
  • Broadband: £40 to £150 per month for the primary fibre, plus a backup line

Put a 15% contingency on top. You will need it. The thing that always blows the budget is the fit-out team telling you, three weeks before opening, that the comms cabinet has to move and they need fresh cabling pulled.

EPOS - the biggest single decision you’ll make

Your EPOS is the spine of the operation. Changing it later is painful, expensive, and politically draining because the team has to retrain. Get this one right.

Questions I’d push every EPOS vendor on, in writing:

  • Who actually owns the data? Can I export every transaction, every menu version, every staff record at any time, in a format I can use?
  • What’s the total cost over three years, including hardware, licences, support, and any “professional services” charges for menu changes?
  • Does it integrate with the payment processor I want - or am I locked into yours?
  • What happens when the internet goes down? Can I still take cards and print kitchen tickets?
  • Who answers the phone at 8pm on a Saturday when the kitchen printer dies?
  • What’s the notice period and what does the contract say about price rises?

Be very wary of three-year and five-year contracts with automatic renewal clauses. The hospitality EPOS market is moving fast and you don’t want to be locked into the wrong platform in 2028 because you signed something in a hurry in 2026.

If you want a longer comparison of the main UK EPOS players, we’ve written one separately - but the questions above matter more than the brand on the box.

Payment processing - the trade-offs nobody explains

Stripe Terminal, Dojo, SumUp, Zettle, Adyen, Square, Worldpay. They all take cards. The differences are in fees, settlement speed, hardware quality, and how much pain you’ll feel in two years if you want to switch.

The honest summary:

  • SumUp and Zettle are cheap, easy to start, and great for a coffee shop or pop-up. Limited integration with full-service EPOS.
  • Dojo is aggressive on sales and very common in UK hospitality. Fast settlement is genuinely useful for cash flow. Read the contract carefully.
  • Stripe Terminal is excellent if you’re tech-forward and want clean APIs. Slightly less mature on the in-person hardware side but catching up.
  • Adyen is what the bigger groups use. Brilliant once you scale, overkill for a single site unless you’re already certain you’re rolling out more.

The short-term pain of integrating Stripe or Adyen properly will save you long-term flexibility. The short-term ease of SumUp or Dojo can lock you into a particular EPOS or processing model that becomes awkward when you grow. Pick with your three-year plan in mind, not your opening week.

Broadband and resilience - yes, even at one site

You need fibre. Full fibre (FTTP) if it’s available on your street, leased line if your covers count is high enough to justify the cost. And you need a backup. We go into more detail on our business internet page.

A backup line sounds excessive for a single site until the day BT digs up the road outside, your primary line drops, and you’re standing in the doorway telling guests you can’t take cards. A 4G or 5G failover router that automatically picks up when the main line drops costs less per month than two covers. Buy it.

This is one of the things we cover in detail in our managed network work - segmenting the line so payments and EPOS keep flowing even when guest WiFi is saturated.

WiFi - three networks, not one

Your WiFi should run at least three separate networks (technically VLANs, but you don’t need to care about that):

  1. Guest WiFi - open or with a simple captive portal, completely isolated from everything else
  2. Staff WiFi - for tablets, ordering devices, back-office laptops
  3. POS and payments - its own segment, no guest traffic, no staff phones

If a vendor offers you a single flat network with everything on it, walk away. It’s a security and reliability problem waiting to happen, and it’s one of the first things a PCI assessor will flag.

Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace

Both work. The honest difference for a restaurant:

  • Microsoft 365 is what most of your suppliers, accountants, and landlords use. Excel is still the lingua franca of hospitality finance. The Business Standard tier gives you Teams, SharePoint, and proper desktop apps for not very much per user.
  • Google Workspace is lovely if your team is younger and lives in a browser. Docs and Sheets are fine, calendar is excellent, but you’ll occasionally hit friction when an accountant sends you a complex Excel model.

For most first-time restaurants we work with, Microsoft 365 Business Standard wins on pure compatibility with the rest of the industry. Pick whichever you’ll actually use, and turn on MFA on day one.

Cyber security on a small-site budget

You don’t need an enterprise security stack. You do need the basics, properly configured:

  • Cyber Essentials certification - about £400 to £600 to get certified, and a useful forcing function for the basics
  • MFA on everything - email, EPOS admin, payments portal, banking, social media accounts
  • Endpoint protection on every device that touches the business
  • Backups of your finance system, rota, and Microsoft 365 data - yes, you need to back up M365 separately, Microsoft doesn’t do it for you the way you think
  • Staff awareness - a 30-minute briefing on phishing and password hygiene is worth more than most pieces of software

Hospitality is a soft target. Phishing emails impersonating suppliers, fake invoices, and EPOS credential theft are routine. Spend a small amount of money to get the basics right and you’ll dodge 95% of what’s out there. We’ve written more about how we approach this on our cyber security page.

The “free IT” trap

Your EPOS vendor will offer “free support included”. Your payment processor will offer “free terminals”. Your broadband provider will throw in “free WiFi setup”.

None of it is free. It’s bundled, which means:

  • The EPOS vendor’s support team only fixes EPOS problems. When the issue is your switch, your firewall, or your printer, they shrug.
  • The payment terminals are subsidised by your transaction fees, which are higher than they would be otherwise.
  • The “free WiFi setup” is a single consumer router in a cupboard, and it will fall over the first Friday night you’re at capacity.

A specialist hospitality MSP costs real money - but you get one number to call when anything breaks, someone who knows how all the pieces fit together, and someone whose job is to argue with vendors on your behalf. For a single site, you’re looking at low hundreds of pounds a month for proper managed support. That’s less than a single bad Saturday service.

What to negotiate, what to never sign

Negotiate hard on:

  • Contract length - push for 12 months on anything new, with the option to extend
  • Auto-renewal clauses - strike them out or shorten the notice window
  • Price rise clauses - cap them at CPI or a fixed percentage
  • Early termination fees - know the number before you sign
  • Data export rights - get them in writing

Never sign:

  • A five-year EPOS contract on your first site
  • A payment processing deal without seeing the full fee schedule including chargebacks, refunds, and PCI non-compliance fees
  • Any contract that says you can’t move your data when you leave
  • A support contract with a vague SLA - “best efforts” is not a response time
  • Anything your solicitor hasn’t seen, if the total commitment is over £10,000

A final word

Opening a restaurant is hard enough without the IT becoming a second full-time job. Get the boring stuff right, ask awkward questions of every vendor, and don’t sign anything in the last fortnight before opening - that’s when the worst contracts get rushed through.

If you want a second opinion on a quote, a contract, or a vendor shortlist before you sign, that’s literally what we do. Have a look at how we work with operators on our hospitality IT support page, or just send the contract over and we’ll tell you where the traps are.