What a POS system actually costs in Sri Lanka

Ask three suppliers what a POS system costs and you will get three answers, all of them "it depends", and none of them a number. That is not always evasion — the honest range genuinely is wide — but it leaves you unable to budget, which is the entire reason you asked.

So here are actual numbers.

The short version

For a single shop in Sri Lanka, expect LKR 75,000 to 125,000 to set up, then around LKR 6,500 a month. A growing shop or restaurant that needs inventory and more than one register is realistically LKR 150,000 to 250,000 to set up and LKR 12,500 a month. Multi-branch or wholesale, with credit ledgers and a rep ordering app, starts around LKR 350,000 and runs to LKR 600,000.

Those are our published prices, and you can see what sits inside each one on our pricing page. Other suppliers will land in similar territory. Be careful with anyone dramatically below it — we will come back to why.

What actually moves the price

Four things, in roughly this order of impact.

How many places you sell from. One counter is straightforward. Three counters in one shop is a little more. Three branches that need to see each other's stock is a different system, because now you have transfers, consolidated reporting and the question of what happens when one branch loses its internet connection.

Whether stock has to be right. A shop that bills and does not track inventory is much cheaper than one where the stock count has to survive deliveries, returns, damage and stock-takes. This is the single most common place where a cheap quote and an expensive quote are actually quoting different systems.

How unusual your pricing is. Fixed prices per item are easy. Bulk discounts, customer-specific rates, credit terms, and unit conversions — buying in kilograms and selling in grams — each add real work. They are also usually the part that makes your business work, so they are worth paying for.

Whether it needs to work offline. Continuing to bill through an internet outage means the counter holds its own copy of the data and reconciles later. That is genuinely more engineering than a system that assumes a connection.

The costs that get left out

This is where budgets break. In our experience, the quote is rarely the problem — the omissions are.

• Hardware. Barcode scanner, receipt printer, cash drawer. Budget LKR 35,000 to 80,000 for a counter, depending on quality. Anyone bundling hardware into a suspiciously round software price is usually making margin on it.
• Getting your products into the system. If your catalogue lives in a notebook rather than a spreadsheet, someone has to type it. Ask explicitly whether data entry is included, and for how many items.
• Training beyond the first session. Staff turn over. Ours is LKR 7,500 a session after the first, which is free. Ask what happens when you hire.
• The annual maintenance you will need whether or not it is quoted. Software that is not updated rots — security patches stop arriving, browsers move on, tax rules change. For custom builds this typically runs 15–20% of build cost per year.
• Hosting. Usually folded into a monthly fee. Ask whether the fee is hosting alone or hosting plus support, because those are very different things when something breaks on a Sunday.

Why the very cheap quote usually costs more

There is always someone offering to build it for LKR 30,000. Sometimes that is a student doing genuinely good work at a price they will later regret. More often it is a template, installed and abandoned.

The failure mode is predictable and we see it repeatedly: the system works for four months, then something breaks or the tax rate changes, and the person who built it has moved on to a full-time job and stopped answering. You are now paying someone else to understand code that was never documented, which costs more than doing it properly the first time.

We decline projects under LKR 60,000 for the same reason from the other direction — below that number we cannot support the system properly, and a business that has been supported badly is worse off than one that was told the truth. If your budget is genuinely under that, a template plus hosting is a reasonable answer and we will point you at one.

Questions worth asking any supplier

Take these to whoever you are talking to, including us:

1. What happens to my data if I leave? (You should own it and be able to export it. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.)
2. Does billing keep working when the internet drops?
3. What exactly is included in the monthly fee — hosting, support, updates, or only some of those?
4. Who answers the phone when something breaks at 7pm on a Poya day?
5. Can I see a system you built that is running now?

That last one matters most. Anyone can show you a demo. Ask to see something a real business depends on today — ours is a food supplier in Sabaragamuwa, and you can read exactly what we built and then go and use the live site yourself.

Where to start

If you are still working out whether you need this at all, the useful first step is not a quote. It is a conversation about how you bill and count stock today, because a good supplier will sometimes tell you that your problem is a process rather than software — and that is a much cheaper fix.

If it is software, what we build and what is included is set out on our POS systems page.