Switching from a card terminal and a spreadsheet
You take card payments fine — the terminal does that. What you do not have is a system that knows what was sold, so every question about the business is answered by retyping receipts.
Payments work. Everything around them is manual
What you actually have today
A standalone card terminal is a payment device, not a point of sale. It knows an amount was taken; it does not know what was sold, at what margin, by whom, or how often. Everything past the payment — stock, reporting, staff performance, what to reorder — is reconstructed by hand from receipts and a spreadsheet, usually on a Sunday.
That is worth naming plainly, because it is why this migration is the easiest of the ones on this page and also the biggest change to daily work. There is very little data to move and a great deal of habit to replace.
What migrating looks like here
Your spreadsheet IS the export. A product or menu list with prices in columns is exactly what the onboarding call needs, and if the prices in it are out of date this is the useful moment to fix them — everyone discovers a few during the mapping.
The card terminal usually stays too, at least at first. Pacific POS works alongside the payment hardware you already have rather than requiring you to change processor on the same day you change system, which is two disruptions where one will do.
When not to do this
If the spreadsheet is genuinely working for you — a single operator, a short fixed list of items, no staff to manage and no stock to reorder — then a POS is overhead you do not need yet, and we would rather say so. The point at which it stops being true is usually the first employee or the second location, whichever comes first.
The general guide
What comes across, what does not, and when switching is the wrong call this month — all of it applies whatever you are moving from.
Read the full switching guide