HelchPOS vs DINES: payments-first, or kitchen-first

DINES calls itself "full counter POS, built for speed", and sells to food halls, festivals, theatres and bars. Read their site for ten minutes and the shape is clear: integrated card acquiring is the product, and the till, the kiosk, the QR menu and the vendor settlements all hang off it. That is a coherent business, and it is the opposite decision from ours.

HelchPOS records card payments taken on a terminal you already own, and never touches the money. Everything we built instead sits behind the counter: recipes, ingredient-level stock, kitchen screens, rotas, margin.

Where DINES is ahead

• Payments, and everything downstream of them. One statement, one settlement, one provider; refunds to the original card from the till; automated vendor revenue splits and daily settlement reports. We cannot do any of that, because we deliberately are not in the payment chain.
• Trading with no internet. They describe automatic Wi-Fi to eSIM failover and quote 97.4% of sales captured during outages. Our kitchen screen keeps working offline and syncs its bumps when the connection returns; the till cannot take a full sale offline. That is a real gap and it is on our list, not in our product.
• Pay at the table on a handheld, which needs their payments to exist at all.
• Event-shaped controls we have not built: seat-level delivery, busy-mode messaging at a threshold, queue position shown to the guest, staff leaderboards, payroll export. Two things this list first named were wrong to be on it: order-ahead collection slots with a cap per slot were already built when this was written (9 August 2026), and an order-ready message ladder — text, then WhatsApp, then the counter — followed on 26 August 2026, though no text has yet been sent to a guest because no SMS provider is connected; every order so far has fallen through to the counter.

Where HelchPOS is ahead

• What a dish is made of. Selling a taco takes the tortilla and the chicken off the shelf, at the quantities you set, including modifiers. A dish nobody has costed shows a blank rather than a hundred per cent margin. DINES lists "stock management" and does not describe recipe depth.
• Receiving from a photograph of the invoice, matched to your own catalogue and turned into a received purchase order — stock, cost prices and price history all moving together.
• Who may change what. Four levels — us, the hall, the vendor manager, the person at the terminal — and any setting can be set and locked at any level, with per-staff capabilities under that.
• The kitchen. A pass built for an expediter, a runner's board covering every kitchen in the hall, prep areas, and a phone layout that fits twelve tickets on screen.
• Price. The software is free; you pay for hardware if you buy it from us.

Who should choose which

If you want one company to process your card payments, settle your vendors and support the terminal, DINES is answering that question directly and we are not answering it at all.

If your problem is margin — what the food costs, what walks out of the fridge, what a dish is actually worth once you count the bacon — and you already have card machines you are happy with, we are built for that and DINES is not.

DINES claims above read from dines.co.uk on 15 August 2026, and written up in full in our competitor library. Written by the HelchPOS team, who obviously have a side in this.