Nearly every point of sale on the market is sold as cloud today. The word has stretched far enough to cover two quite different things, and the difference tends to show up in your operation long after the sales deck is closed. For an operator comparing systems, being able to tell them apart is worth a few minutes.
The same software, somewhere else
A hosted system began life as software designed to run on a machine in the back office. Moving it to a remote server changes where it lives. You reach it over the internet, and the assumptions it was built on travel with it: it gets patched one installation at a time, it scales by adding more of itself, and it treats each location's data as its own store.
Plenty of hosted systems are stable and well supported. The point is that hosting is a change of address.
Built for the network from the start
A cloud-native system was designed from the first line for distributed, always-connected operation. Many locations write into one platform. The platform grows by adding capacity to what is already running. Redundancy sits at every layer, because the design assumes individual components will eventually fail.
Those assumptions produce different behaviour the moment you are running more than one restaurant.
Four questions that separate them
You can usually tell which kind of system you are looking at by asking four things. The answers are concrete enough that a vendor can demonstrate them rather than describe them.
How does a new location get added? A cloud-native answer describes configuration. A hosted answer describes installation, hardware, and a connection back to the sites already running.
What happens when an update ships? A cloud-native answer describes every site moving to the current release together. A hosted answer describes a schedule, a maintenance window, and a version number per location.
Where does a group report come from? A cloud-native answer describes one platform holding every location's data as service happens. A hosted answer describes a sync, a batch, or an export that gets combined.
What happens when one piece fails? 
A cloud-native answer describes automatic failover inside the platform. A hosted answer usually comes back to the local server, and to what the site does while it is down.
Why the distinction earns its keep
At one restaurant, the two feel similar. The gap opens as you add sites, because every one of those four answers repeats per location. Installation effort repeats. Version drift repeats. Export and reconciliation repeat. A single point of failure repeats.
By the fourth or fifth location, that repetition is a meaningful share of somebody's week. Choosing on architecture while the group is still small costs less than changing architecture later.
What This Means for Canadian Multi-Unit Operators
Two questions are worth adding to that list if you operate in Canada.
The first is about provincial variation. Ask how the system handles labour standards, tax configuration, and tipping practice that differ across provinces, and whether those rules are set centrally or maintained site by site. The answer tells you how much of your head office week goes into configuration once you cross a provincial line.
The second is about support hours. A group with restaurants in St. John's and Victoria spans four and a half time zones, which means service somewhere in the group is running for most of the day. Ask where support sits, and what time a person actually answers.
Squirrel has worked in Canadian hospitality since 1984, and both questions are ones we are used to answering.
Ready to see what a modern POS platform can do for your operation? Book a demo with Squirrel Systems.
