HMRC has been running a sustained campaign against electronic sales suppression — till fraud — and hospitality was where it started. If you run a restaurant or takeaway in the UK, this is the piece of tax enforcement most likely to arrive at your door, and the rules governing the software you use are about to change.
Here is the honest version: what ESS is, what the law says today, what is being proposed, and what is actually worth doing about it.
What ESS actually means
Electronic sales suppression is altering or hiding sales after they have happened so that the recorded takings are smaller than the real ones.
In practice it looks like a few specific things:
- Software that deletes or rewrites completed transactions after the fact.
- A till configured so that a “training” or “practice” mode quietly keeps real sales out of the end-of-day report.
- A second set of books produced by the till itself — one number for the customer, another for the return.
- Any add-on tool sold specifically to make a percentage of sales vanish from the record.
The distinguishing feature is that the sale genuinely happened, the customer paid, and the record was changed afterwards. That is what separates it from an ordinary mistake or a legitimate refund, both of which leave a trail.
The penalties are unusual, and worth understanding
Most tax penalties follow from underpaying tax. ESS penalties do not work that way.
Since 2022 HMRC has had the power to charge up to £50,000 for possessing an ESS tool — and that penalty can be charged even where the tool was never used to evade a penny of tax. Making, supplying or promoting such a tool carries its own separate penalty. HMRC also gained information powers letting it require details of ESS software and who supplied it.
On top of that sit the ordinary consequences: assessment of the underpaid tax, interest, evasion penalties, and in serious cases criminal prosecution with an unlimited fine and up to seven years’ imprisonment.
The enforcement has been real rather than theoretical. HMRC has issued millions of pounds in ESS-related penalties, has published naming-and-shaming lists in which restaurants and takeaways feature heavily, and has carried out raids on hospitality businesses. Advisers expect the focus to broaden into retail and wholesale, but nobody expects it to leave hospitality.
The practical implication for an honest operator: the possession penalty means you want to be able to say, with confidence, what your till software does — not merely that you have never told anyone to use it dishonestly. Features you have never touched are still features you possess.
What is being proposed
Between 23 June and 18 August 2026 HMRC consulted on introducing mandatory software standards for EPOS and MPOS systems — a first for the UK, which has never had a fiscalisation regime of the kind that Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Greece all operate.
The main proposals were:
- An unalterable, complete transaction log covering every transaction and adjustment, held in the OECD’s SAF-T format and linked together in a chain so that changes are detectable.
- Receipts digitally signed and linked to the previous receipt, forming the audit trail.
- Mandatory receipt information, possibly including a QR code, so that an officer can verify a system’s records quickly on site.
- Registration or certification of systems — with three options floated: manufacturer certification, supplier registration, or user registration.
- Mandatory use of a compliant EPOS system by businesses in higher-risk sectors, which explicitly includes hospitality and takeaways.
- Penalties on manufacturers and suppliers who fail to protect their systems against being used for suppression.
Two things about this deserve emphasis, because vendors will not emphasise them.
None of it is law. It was a consultation. No legislation has been introduced, no timeline has been fixed, and HMRC’s own document says measures would be introduced over time rather than all at once, with systems updated rather than replaced where possible. There is no such thing as an HMRC-certified till today. If someone is selling you one, they are selling you a story.
The proposals are written around devices, not records. They largely assume a system installed at the business. A growing share of restaurant sales never touch such a device — they are placed on a customer’s own phone through a browser and recorded in a supplier’s cloud. How that trade is covered is one of the genuinely unsettled questions.
We think that framing is the wrong way round, and we said so: we responded to the consultation as a software provider, arguing that the standard should be written in terms of the record — written at the time of sale, sequenced, hash-linked to the one before it, exportable and independently verifiable — rather than the device, because that covers tills and cloud ordering alike and will not need rewriting for whatever comes next. We also argued that whatever is required, the business itself should be able to verify its own records without depending on its software supplier to vouch for them.
What to actually do now
Not much, and nothing expensive. In rough order of value:
1. Find out what your till can do. Ask your provider directly, in writing: can any completed sale be deleted or edited so that it no longer appears in the daily report, and does the system have a training or demo mode that removes sales from the totals? You want to know the answer before an officer does.
2. Account for the channels that never hit the till. Online orders, app orders, QR-code table ordering, phone orders written on a pad. A complete record of your trade is the thing that makes an enquiry short. A record with gaps in it is the thing that makes an enquiry long, whatever the reason for the gaps.
3. Make sure you can export it yourself. If the only way to produce a full history of your sales is to email your software supplier and wait, you have a dependency exactly where you least want one. This matters more than any certification badge.
4. Talk to your accountant, not to a salesperson. The people selling fiscal middleware have a commercial interest in the UK adopting the strictest possible version of these proposals. Your accountant does not.
5. Do not buy hardware in a panic. A consultation closed in August 2026 is not a deadline. Anyone using it as one is using it to close a sale.
Where Ontabee fits, plainly
We should be precise about this, because the subject invites overclaiming.
Ontabee records every order and every payment movement to an append-only chain as it happens — order placed, accepted, rejected, cancelled, completed, item and price amendments, payment captured, refund initiated, refund settled, refund failed. Each record is hashed over all of its own fields together with the hash of the record before it, so altering or removing one record breaks every link after it. Each trading day is summarised into a Merkle root. You can export any period, and the export contains a small verification program that recomputes every hash from the record contents — it runs offline, on any machine with a standard Python installation, with no account and no connection to us. Your accountant can check your records without taking our word for anything.
And what it is not: Ontabee holds no approval or certification under any fiscalisation regime, in the UK or anywhere else — no such UK certification currently exists to hold. We have built no country-specific adapters, and nothing here changes what you owe, what you must file, or when. It changes what you can put in front of someone who asks what came through your ordering channels. Nothing on this page is tax or legal advice.
If you want the detail of how the record chain works, it is set out on our sales records page. If you want to see the export and the verifier for yourself, start free — there is no commission and no lock-in, so you can test the claim rather than believe it.