Katalyst
POS systems · 50 states and DC

Restaurant POS systems in the USA

Katalyst is an all-in-one restaurant POS built by operators, running in all 50 states and Washington DC. Send us three months of merchant statements and we will show you your exact processing cost on our rates — before you sit through a demo.

Get a free rate analysisGet a demo
Restaurant counter with a Katalyst POS terminal during service
Free rate analysis

See your exact processing cost before you talk to sales

Most POS vendors quote a bundled processing rate and hope you don't read the statements. Send us yours — we'll show you the line-item difference Katalyst Payments would make on the same volume. No demo required first.

Get a free rate analysisHow Katalyst Payments works

24-hour response · No commitment · Confidential. We work off your real merchant data, not a sales-pitch estimate.

  • How it works

  • Your last 3 months of merchant statements

    Or just your effective rate and monthly volume — we'll work with what you have.

  • We map the same volume onto Katalyst Payments

    Interchange-plus pricing, no bundled markup, no surprise tier shifts.

  • You see the exact monthly + annual difference

    Average client saves $55K+/year. We show you the math before you commit to anything.

“The analysis Katalyst provided me literally saved me thousands of dollars and I would have never noticed any of it unless the team at Katalyst brought it to my attention.”
Marc Olivadesa · General manager
How to choose

Six questions that actually separate POS systems

Feature checklists have stopped discriminating between vendors — nearly every serious platform now ships online ordering, a kitchen display, loyalty, and handhelds. What still differs is pricing structure, ownership of the stack, failure behaviour, and exit terms. Put these six to every vendor on your shortlist, including us.

How processing is priced

Payments are the largest recurring line in a POS relationship and the easiest to obscure. A bundled or tiered rate hides the split between interchange, card-brand assessments, and the vendor's own markup, so two quotes that look identical can differ by five figures a year.

Ask every vendor

Show me interchange, assessments, and your markup as three separate lines on a sample month of my volume.

Katalyst

Interchange-plus, with the markup stated separately. No bundled tiers and no surprise tier shifts.

Whether you can get a number before a sales call

Quote-gating is a negotiating position, not a technical constraint. By the time most vendors show you a rate you have spent an hour in a demo and feel invested in the outcome.

Ask every vendor

What is my effective rate on my actual volume — in writing, before I book a demo?

Katalyst

Send three months of merchant statements, or just your effective rate and monthly volume, and we return the math within 24 hours. No demo required first.

What is native and what is a partner integration

Every integration is another contract, another bill, and another support handoff on the night it breaks during service. The question is not whether a vendor offers a feature but whether they own it.

Ask every vendor

Which of these do you build, and which is a third party I would be paying and calling separately?

Katalyst

POS, payments, online ordering, kitchen display, loyalty and gift, reservations, kiosk, and a branded mobile app are all first-party on one platform.

Exactly what happens when the internet drops

"Works offline" covers everything from full local authorization to nothing but a cash drawer. The difference decides whether you keep serving during an outage or start writing down card numbers.

Ask every vendor

Name the transaction types that still complete offline, and tell me what happens to them when the connection returns.

Katalyst

Store-and-forward: swipe and manual key-in keep running and sync on reconnect. That is narrower than full offline authorization, and we would rather you hear it here than find out mid-outage.

The cost of being wrong

The switching cost of a POS is measured in weeks of reconfiguration and staff retraining, not in the subscription. This is the number that should govern how much diligence the decision gets.

Ask every vendor

What is the term, what is the early-termination fee, who owns my sales history, and in what format can I export it?

Katalyst

Ask us those four in writing and hold us to the answers — the same way you should hold every vendor on your shortlist.

Who is on the other end at 8pm on a Saturday

Support quality is invisible during evaluation and decisive afterwards. A tiered support plan that routes you to email during dinner service is a different product from one that does not.

Ask every vendor

Who answers during peak service, is it included, and what is the median time to a human?

Katalyst

24/7 support, included rather than sold as a tier.

Before you get any further

Where Katalyst is the wrong choice

Five situations where we are not the right answer. If one of them describes your operation, a rate analysis will confirm it faster than a demo will, and you will have lost twenty minutes instead of a quarter.

  • You are a single low-volume location taking card-present payments only

    Below roughly $15–20K a month in card volume, a flat-rate processor's simplicity often beats an interchange-plus arrangement once platform fees are counted. Run our analysis anyway — if the math favours staying put, that is what the analysis will say.

  • You need full offline card authorization, not store-and-forward

    If your location loses connectivity often enough that swipe and key-in fallback is not good enough, you want a system with local authorization. Ours is not that.

  • You are retail without a food-service operation

    The platform is built around restaurant workflows — coursing, modifiers, tables, kitchen routing. General retail is better served elsewhere.

  • You require an on-premise deployment

    Katalyst is cloud-based. Operators with a hard local-only requirement, usually for internal policy reasons, will not be able to meet it here.

  • You are early in a contract with a large early-termination fee

    The savings have to clear the exit cost before a switch makes sense. We will tell you how many months that takes, and if the answer is more than your remaining term, we will tell you to wait.

Keep researching

Still building a shortlist?

Ranked comparisons, migration timelines, and requirements by operation type live on their own pages rather than being summarised here.

Compare the vendors

Already on another POS

By operation type

Local coverage

Pick your state for local POS coverage

Katalyst runs in all 50 states and Washington DC. The platform is the same everywhere; what differs is how prepared-food tax applies, how tip credit and service charges are handled, and what your accountant expects to see. Each state page covers those specifics rather than repeating a national overview.

FAQ

Operating across state lines

Is Katalyst the same product in every state?

The platform is identical. What changes by state is configuration — sales-tax rules and how tax applies to prepared food, tip-credit and service-charge handling, and the reporting your accountant expects. That configuration is set up per location during onboarding, which is why each state has its own page covering the local specifics rather than one national page pretending the rules are uniform.

Can one account cover locations in more than one state?

Yes. Tax and labour settings are per location, while reporting rolls up across all of them, so a group operating in three states runs one platform with three tax configurations and a single consolidated view. This is the main reason multi-state groups end up here rather than on a single-state vendor.

How long does switching take, and what happens to my sales history?

Plan for four to eight weeks end to end for a typical single location — menu rebuild and staff training take most of it, not the hardware. Historical sales data is exported from your current system and retained by you; ask any vendor, including us, for the export format in writing before you sign anything. The migration guides linked above walk through the timeline vendor by vendor.

Is there a single best POS system for restaurants in the USA?

No, and any page that says otherwise is selling something. The right answer changes with service model, volume, number of locations, and how much of your revenue arrives through channels you do not control. Our vendor reviews and the buying guide are written to help you rule options out, including ruling us out.

Ready to see the numbers?

Start with your statements, not a sales call

Send three months of merchant statements and we will show you the line-item difference on your own volume within 24 hours.

Get a free rate analysisGet a demo