What is a POS?

POS literally means point of sale, but in business conversations it covers two related things worth separating carefully. The POS terminal is the card machine supplied by a bank or a fintech, with its own fees and settlement times, and legally mandatory for retailers above certain turnover thresholds in Romania. The POS system is the software running the sale in a shop, restaurant or salon: the till interface where an operator rings up products, the fiscal link to the cash register (in Romania through electronic-journal registers reporting to ANAF, the Romanian tax authority), automatic stock deduction on every receipt, promotions and loyalty handling, and sales reports by hour, product and employee. The difference between a shop that merely prints receipts and one genuinely managed by data sits in that software, and above all in its integration. An isolated POS produces the same islands as any isolated software — shop stock unknown to the website, sales retyped into accounting by hand. A POS integrated with inventory or ERP and with the online store closes the omnichannel loop: one real stock figure, online orders collected in store, the day’s position visible in the company dashboard with nobody retyping anything. When choosing, the criteria matter in this order of pain: flawless local fiscal compliance, which is non-negotiable; real integration with your inventory system and e-commerce through documented APIs or existing connectors, where brochure promises usually die; offline operation, because selling must not stop when the internet does; and reporting that reflects reality.