The register is not admin
New bartenders treat the point-of-sale terminal as the boring part between making drinks. It is in fact the part of the job with the sharpest consequences, because it is the only record that exists of what you did all night.
Inventory says how much liquor left the building. The POS says how much was sold. The gap between those two numbers is your reputation, and nobody investigating a gap can tell the difference between carelessness, generosity, and stealing. They all look identical in a report.
That is worth absorbing early, because it reframes a lot of small decisions that otherwise feel harmless.
The systems
You will meet Toast, Square, Aloha, Micros, SpotOn, Lightspeed, Clover, or something the owner has had since 2009. They differ in layout and are identical in concept:
- A grid of buttons, usually grouped beer / wine / liquor / cocktails / food, mirroring the price ladder from the last lesson
- Modifiers attached to items — "up," "rocks," "double," "no salt," "sub Tito's"
- Tabs — open checks held under a name or a card
- Payment, split, and transfer functions
- A manager override that gates the operations you cannot do alone