Switching from a legacy on-premise POS
The hard part is not the software — it is that your data is sitting on a machine in the back office and the person who set it up has moved on. Here is how that migration actually goes.
There is a server in the back office, and support means a call-out
What makes this migration different
An on-premise system keeps your catalogue, your price history and often your customer list in a database on a machine you own. That is good news for the migration: the data exists and it is yours. The difficulty is reaching it. Older systems export reluctantly, sometimes only through a reporting screen that paginates, and the person who configured the thing is frequently no longer at the company.
The practical answer is to stop trying to get a perfect export and start with the one that is easy. A menu or product list as a CSV is enough to build the catalogue. Historical sales are almost never worth migrating and almost always what people ask about first — the old system can stay switched off in a cupboard as your archive, which is what it will be anyway.
The part that surprises people
The hardware usually stays. A card terminal, receipt printer, cash drawer and scanner bought for an on-premise system are standard equipment, and a cloud POS talks to the same peripherals. What changes is the box in the back office, which stops existing — no more scheduled reboots, no more a-patch-broke-it on a Saturday, and no more paying for a call-out to look at a machine.
The other surprise is what you gain rather than what you move: your figures stop living on one screen behind the counter. That is the change managers notice in the first week, not the migration.
How to sequence it
Export what you can, let us map the columns on the onboarding call, then run both systems for one service and compare the totals at close. If they agree, the old machine gets switched off after the next trading day. If they do not, you have found the discrepancy while you still have both systems — which is the whole reason for the overlap.
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