Custom POS System Development

When a custom POS is worth building

Most businesses should use Square, Toast, Clover or Shopify POS and spend their money elsewhere.

Tepia builds the software layer while the payment processor keeps doing what it does best. You get a checkout that matches your business and a back office you own, on hardware that is certified, supported and easy to replace. The honest comparison is on Square versus a custom POS system.

Square or Stripe Terminal hardware with your own software

Tepia does not build card readers and you should not pay anyone to. Square’s Reader SDK and Stripe Terminal both let a custom app on an iPad or Android tablet take chip, tap and swipe payments through certified hardware while the processor handles the card data.

The table below compares the two paths Tepia most often takes, plus standard Square for reference.

Tepia’s rule of thumb: stay on Square if you are already there and only the checkout screens need to change; choose Stripe Terminal when the POS is one part of a product that also takes payments online or in a mobile app, because a single customer record across channels is worth a great deal for loyalty and retention.

Retail and restaurant flows Tepia builds

A POS is a set of flows, and the flows differ by business. Tepia scopes them during Discovery and builds only the ones you run.

• Retail checkout. Barcode scanning, variants and modifiers, discounts and promotions with rules, returns and exchanges against original tender, gift cards, store credit, and customer lookup for loyalty.
• Restaurant ordering. Table and tab management, coursing, modifiers, split checks, tips and tip pooling, kitchen display routing, online and in app orders merged into the same queue.
• Services and deposits. Appointments, deposits and balances, partial payments, packages and memberships, recurring billing through Stripe.
• Inventory. Stock by location, receiving, transfers, counts and low stock alerts, synced to your ERP or QuickBooks.
• Offline first operation. The tablet keeps selling when the internet drops, queues transactions within processor limits and syncs when it returns. Tepia builds this pattern as standard because a POS that stops at the counter is not a POS.

Tepia built grocery ordering for Mother’s Nutritional Center with MNC Go, and brings that experience with catalogs, locations and order flows to POS projects. Restaurant specifics are on custom restaurant app development.

How Tepia approaches custom POS system development

Discovery begins with a system investigation of your current POS, processor, catalog, inventory and accounting systems, followed by user interviews with cashiers, managers and back office staff and a third party integration review (processor SDKs, QuickBooks, your ERP, loyalty and ecommerce platforms). Deliverables are an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories for every flow, including edge cases like partial refunds and voided tips.

Design produces wireframes for the tablet and the back office plus a style guide, with particular attention to speed: a cashier should complete a standard sale in a handful of taps. Development and Testing runs on Alpha and Beta schedules with a written test plan covering functional testing of every tender type, user acceptance testing by real staff at a pilot location, and non functional testing for offline behavior, receipt printing and reader reconnection.

Training is hands on at the counter, in person or remote, using user story scenarios. Launch includes catalog and customer data migration from the old POS, a transition period where both systems run at pilot stores, and Tepia support reps on site or on call for the first days.

Every engagement has an assigned Tepia project manager, US based design and engineering leadership, and hand picked engineers in US hours. Full process at tepia.co/process.

PCI scope, security and compliance with Tepia

PCI DSS scope is the detail that decides whether a custom POS is a manageable project or a compliance burden. Tepia’s architecture keeps card data inside the processor’s certified reader and SDK. Your app never sees a card number, never stores one and never transmits one; it receives a token and a result. That approach keeps most of your system out of PCI DSS scope and typically leaves you with a self assessment questionnaire rather than a full audit, which your processor and qualified security assessor confirm for your specific setup.

Beyond payments, Tepia applies role based access with employee PINs, audit logs for refunds, voids, discounts and drawer events, encryption in transit and at rest, and device management for tablets in the field. Customer data handling follows GDPR and CCPA practices. For businesses that also run a customer app, Tepia ties the POS customer record to the app account so loyalty and retention features work across channels, which is where Tepia clients report roughly 20% revenue increase after adding mobile.

Frequently asked questions