Cash and Price Display: Two Duties at the Counter

Two duties that share one metre of counter

A guest walks up to your counter and does two things in the same ten seconds: reads a price and reaches for a way to pay. Polish law treats those moments as two separate obligations, in two separate acts, enforced by two different logics. Most owners meet them as one blurred worry — "may we be card-only, and is our board good enough?" — and that blur is where the mistakes live.

This page keeps them apart. The first duty is about the means of payment: what you may not require from a consumer at the moment of sale. The second is about information: what the guest must see before deciding.

The asymmetry in the last three rows drives everything else here. A display failure has a named authority, a named decision and a named ceiling in money; the cash duty, in that same act, has no matching penalty clause. Those are different kinds of "must", and treating them as identical means over-preparing for one and under-preparing for the other.

Acquirer's merchant (akceptant) — a payee other than a consumer, for whose benefit an acquirer provides a payment service (Dz.U. 2026 poz. 623, consolidated text, art. 2 pkt 1b, opened 28.08.2026). A restaurant that accepts cards is one, and the cash provision is addressed to this figure by name.

Both acts are Polish and quoted here in translation; the originals stand in the acts, linked beside every number below.

Cash acceptance: the provision, read line by line

Art. 59ea ust. 1 says that the acquirer's merchant may not make the conclusion of a service contract or a contract of sale of goods with a consumer dependent on payment being made in cashless form, and may not refuse to accept payment from a consumer in banknotes issued by NBP (Dz.U. 2026 poz. 623, consolidated text, opened 28.08.2026).

Read slowly, that is two prohibitions rather than one. The first is about conditioning the contract, and it bites earlier than the moment of payment: "we take orders only from a card-holding guest" is a condition on entering the contract, not on settling it. The second is about refusing the notes, and it bites at the till.

There is a third sentence, in ust. 3 of the same article, and it is the one most often missed by venues that believe they have complied: the merchant may neither impose nor collect fees for accepting payment in NBP banknotes, nor differentiate the price depending on the form of payment. A venue that formally takes cash but adds a handling charge, or prints one price for card and a higher one for cash, has not found a gap; it has walked into a separate sentence of the same article.

The duty to accept cash — the acquirer's merchant may not make a consumer contract dependent on cashless payment and may not refuse central-bank banknotes (art. 59ea ust. 1); ust. 2 names the cases where that does not apply, and ust. 3 forbids charging for cash or differentiating the price by payment form.

One more thing needs saying, because silence would mislead. Inside the act on payment services, no penalty clause points back to art. 59ea: the string identifying that article occurs exactly once in the whole consolidated text, in the heading of the article itself. The proof is narrow and the claim must stay narrow — this act attaches no fine of its own to this duty. It does not prove that a breach carries no consequence anywhere in Polish law.

A third obligation shares the same metre of counter and belongs to a neighbour: what the till must record and how the day is closed, in the fiscal cash register and the daily close. All three merely meet at the same place, and treating them as one topic is how one of the three ends up with no owner.

Exceptions to the cash duty: they are written into the provision

Paragraph 2 of art. 59ea opens by saying that paragraph 1 does not apply, and then lists four numbered points. Four, counted by reading the raw text of the act rather than inferred from a summary.

This page does not restate those four points, and that is a deliberate boundary rather than laziness. First, a paraphrase becomes a second source: the moment an exception lives both in the act and in a restaurant article, the two begin to drift, because the act gets amended and the article does not. Second, one of the four points is tied to a moving number — the average wage announced by the President of Statistics Poland. Printing that value here with no date would be a small lie that ages in silence.

So the honest instruction is short. Open art. 59ea ust. 2 in the consolidated text and read the four points against your own venue. The link above goes to the act, not to a retelling of it. One thing holds without reading a word of them: an exception is a state of the world, not a decision you make.

"Card only" on the door: what that sign is and what it is not

A printed sign is a fact about behaviour, not a legal category, and neither act contains such a phrase. The useful question is therefore not "is the sign legal?" but "what does the sign describe?" — three answers, only one of them a problem.

One: a situation covered by art. 59ea ust. 2. Then the sign is a courtesy that announces what the provision already permits. The sign creates nothing; the situation does.

Two: a temporary fact. The float ran out, the safe is being collected, the note counter failed. That is not a policy and does not belong on laminate; a handwritten note with a date reads as exactly what it is.

Three: a general policy of refusing consumer cash outside any exception. Then the sign is not the breach — it is a written record of the breach, in your own handwriting, on your own door, in front of every guest who walks past.

There is also a quieter signage duty that many venues have never read. The act requires the acquirer's merchant to mark the place of business so that it can be established unambiguously which payment instruments may be used there, and in particular to indicate the scope of accepted payment cards (Dz.U. 2026 poz. 623, consolidated text, art. 59g, opened 28.08.2026). Note the direction: it asks you to publish what you do accept. A venue with no card stickers at all and a venue with a "card only" sign are failing two different tests.

Finally, separate art. 59e from all of the above. It lists six situations in which the merchant may refuse a payment — expired instrument, blocked instrument, signature mismatch, refusal to show an identity document in the case referred to in art. 59f ust. 1, use by an unauthorised person, impossibility of authorising the transaction. That article is about refusing a card, not cash, and mixing the two is the commonest reading error here.

Price display: the duty from the act on informing about prices

The second duty is one sentence and much broader than most menus assume. At the place of retail sale and of providing services, the price and the unit price of the good or service are displayed, in a manner that is unambiguous, raises no doubt, and makes it possible to compare prices (Dz.U. 2023 poz. 168, art. 4 ust. 1, opened 28.08.2026). Four requirements are packed into that sentence, and a venue can pass three while failing the fourth.

1. Place. The place of retail sale and of providing services. A restaurant is both, and the second half is the one people forget.
2. What. The price and the unit price. Two figures, not one.
3. Manner. Unambiguous, raising no doubt.
4. Purpose. Allowing prices to be compared — the requirement that turns "the price exists somewhere" into "the price is usable".

Price display — the duty from the act on informing about prices: at the place of retail sale and of providing services, the price and the unit price are displayed unambiguously, without raising doubt, and in a way that allows prices to be compared.

The act also settles the question that causes more arguments at Polish tables than any other: VAT and excise duty are included in the price (art. 3 ust. 2). The definition of price is equally blunt — the value, in monetary units, which the buyer is obliged to pay the entrepreneur for the good or service (art. 3 ust. 1 pkt 1). Together they give the working rule for the rest of this page: whatever the guest is obliged to pay is the price, and the price is what must be displayed.

There is also a rule for when the display fails. On a discrepancy or doubt as to the price of the offered good or service, the consumer has the right to demand sale at the price most favourable to them (art. 5) — so two prices for one dish is a rule about which of the two you will be selling at.

And the money. For failure to perform the duties referred to in art. 4 ust. 1–5, the voivodeship inspector of the Trade Inspection imposes by decision a fine of up to 20 000 PLN (art. 6 ust. 1). If those duties were not performed at least three times within 12 months, counted from the day the first breach was found, the ceiling is 40 000 PLN (art. 6 ust. 2). Two details get lost in retelling: it is at least three times, not merely "again", and the twelve months run from the first finding, not from the calendar year.

Unit price and item price: two figures, both of them owed

The unit price is the one restaurants get wrong, because it feels like a supermarket rule. The act defines it as the price set per unit of a good or service whose quantity or number is expressed in units of measure within the meaning of the metrology regulations (art. 3 ust. 1 pkt 2).

In a venue it matters most where one product is sold in several sizes: beer at 300 ml and 500 ml, a carafe of wine at 250 ml and 500 ml, water at 330 ml and 750 ml, coffee in two cup sizes. A guest comparing those lines is doing precisely what the act calls comparing prices, and the unit price is what makes it possible instead of arithmetic homework.

Which lines actually owe a unit price

Not every line does. A regulation issued under art. 4 ust. 6 sets the manner of displaying prices and a list of goods for which a unit price is not required. That regulation was not opened for this page, so nothing here declares any item exempt. What this page can give you is an honest denominator.

Unit price coverage = Items with a unit price shown ÷ Items where a unit price is meaningful

• Items with a unit price shown — menu lines carrying a per-unit figure, in pieces;
• Items where a unit price is meaningful — lines whose quantity is expressed in a unit of measure, most often volume, in pieces;
• the ratio is dimensionless, from 0 to 1.

The trap sits in the denominator. Worked example: a card of 120 lines, of which 34 are drinks sold by volume, 21 of them carrying a unit price. Coverage is 21 ÷ 34 = 0.62. Against the whole card the same 21 lines read 21 ÷ 120 = 0.18 — a number that looks alarming and measures nothing. Against a denominator wrongly narrowed to the 12 bottled waters, the same numerator gives 1.75, which is not a share at all and is the clearest possible signal that the denominator was chosen badly.

The two figures also fail differently. An item price can be present and wrong — stale, hand-corrected, different from the till. A unit price can be absent entirely and nobody notices, because no guest complains about a figure they have never seen. The first failure produces arguments; the second produces silence that runs for years.

Where the price has to be visible: card, board, window, website

The act says "at the place of retail sale and of providing services". A venue has several such places, and the guest decides at the one you are least likely to audit.

Two of those rows do not follow from the core provision, so here is where they come from. Advertising is covered explicitly: where a good or service is advertised together with its price, the same rules apply accordingly (art. 4 ust. 5). And art. 6 ust. 1 is keyed to "the duties referred to in art. 4 ust. 1–5", which puts the advertising paragraph inside the penalised range.

The website is not a lower-stakes surface

Owners treat the printed card as the serious artefact and the website as marketing. From the point of view of a guest deciding whether to come, and of art. 4 ust. 5, that ranking is backwards: the site is read by more people, earlier in the decision, and a stale price survives longest there because nobody stands next to it. Whoever updates prices needs a written list of every surface, and the site belongs on it next to the board — the same discipline as keeping your venue's data consistent across Google, your site and the portals.

Displaying a price and making it reachable are separate duties, though. A price that lives only inside an image, or in a form that cannot be operated without a mouse, is displayed for some readers and not for others — that side belongs to accessibility of the site and of online ordering.

Service charge and cover fee: shown before the order, or not at all

Neither act contains a provision named "service charge". That absence is the point, and it is what makes this section firm rather than speculative.

Go back to the definition. Price is the value the buyer is obliged to pay for the good or service, and tax is inside it (art. 3 ust. 1 pkt 1 and art. 3 ust. 2). If a guest who orders a dish is obliged to pay the dish plus a mandatory percentage, the amount owed is not the number printed beside the dish. Calling the extra a service charge, a cover, or a large-group supplement changes nothing about that sentence.

So the working test has nothing to do with the name of the charge and everything to do with two words in art. 4 ust. 1: unambiguous and comparable.

• A mandatory charge in small print on the last page, read after ordering, is not unambiguous.
• A mandatory charge applied to some tables and not others, at a manager's discretion, cannot be compared with anything.
• A mandatory charge stated at the top of the card, in the same size as the prices, with the exact condition that triggers it, is legible before the decision — the state the provision describes.

The same reasoning covers any charge that arrives with the order rather than being chosen by the guest, and takeaway packaging is the clearest current example, with its own rules and its own arithmetic, set out in the takeaway packaging fee and the deposit system.

A genuinely voluntary tip is a different animal, because "obliged to pay" is not satisfied. The danger is never the tip; it is a charge presented as voluntary and collected as mandatory.

If you want the internal version of this discipline — one number, one owner, one place where it is defined — that is what a finance layer and a set of dashboards are for: not to interpret the act, but to make it impossible for two surfaces in the same venue to hold two different numbers for the same thing.

Platform price against dine-in price: one venue, two price lists

Almost every venue that delivers runs two price lists, and most arrived there without a decision: the commission was absorbed by raising the platform price, and nobody wrote down that this had happened.

Two price lists are not in themselves a breach — different places of sale, different displayed prices, each correct where it applies. The problem is narrower: the guest must be able to see, before ordering, the price that applies to the channel they are ordering in. A guest who reads your dine-in card, orders through a platform and is charged the platform price has met exactly the situation art. 5 was written for.

Price gap = Item price on the platform − Item price in the room

• Item price on the platform — the price a guest sees in the platform listing for that item, PLN;
• Item price in the room — the price on the card for the identical item on the same date, PLN;
• the difference is in PLN, and it is per item, not per order.

Checking backwards: 42.00 + 7.00 = 49.00 PLN. The gap is legitimate as an economic decision; what turns it into a problem is only ever invisibility.

Who owns the platform price list

In most venues, nobody. It was set up during onboarding by whoever had the laptop and has not been reconciled with the kitchen's card since. The audit is unglamorous: export both lists, sort by item name, read the differences. The lines that have drifted are almost never the popular ones — they are the seasonal ones, changed on the card and never on the platform.

What the gap does to the money, rather than to the compliance file, belongs to two neighbouring pages: the margin on a delivery order after commission works out what actually remains, and restaurant profit margin shows where that remainder lands in the owner's result. The operational side of running one menu across several channels is covered in online orders and what stays with you.

What the guest checks and what the inspector checks are different lists

These two lists overlap far less than owners expect, and preparing for one does not prepare you for the other.

A guest checks, in this order: whether the price stands next to the thing they want; whether the number they read matches the number on the bill; whether anything appeared on the bill that they did not agree to; and whether they can pay the way they intended. A guest almost never checks unit prices, and almost always notices a surprise line.

An inspection checks structure: whether the display exists at the place of sale and of service provision, whether it covers price and unit price, whether it is unambiguous, whether it permits comparison, and whether advertised prices follow the same rules. Art. 6 ust. 3 names four factors behind the amount: the degree of the breach, including character, gravity, scale and duration; the entrepreneur's conduct to date, including repair of consumer harm and earlier breaches of the same duties; turnover and revenue; and sanctions for the same breach in other EU member states. Duration and earlier breaches are both on that list — an error fixed in the week it appears sits differently on all four than one left standing for a year.

Two further deadlines, both easy to miss: the fine is paid within 7 days from the day the decision became final (art. 7 ust. 1), and no decision is issued once 3 years have passed since the failure was found, counted from the end of the year in which it was found (art. 7 ust. 2).

The practical conclusion is not "prepare for the inspector". It is that the guest's list leads the inspector's, and the guest reports it for free, in reviews and at the till, long before anyone official arrives. Whoever reads your incoming messages already holds that signal — an argument for keeping one queue for every inbound request instead of four places nobody owns.

A fifteen-minute audit of your own counter

All of the above is useful only if it can be checked between two services. Here is the pass, in order.

1. Stand outside your own door. Read every payment sign as a stranger. Against art. 59g: can a passer-by establish unambiguously which instruments work here?
2. Buy something at the till, in cash, at a normal hour. Note whether it completes without a conversation, and whether any charge appears that would not appear on a card.
3. Photograph the board and the card. Read them side by side; every line that differs is a discrepancy in the sense of art. 5, and the guest wins those.
4. Count the volume-sold lines — your denominator. Count how many carry a unit price — your numerator.
5. Open your own website on a phone, not the desktop preview. Compare five prices to the card and check that the displayed price is the one the guest is obliged to pay.
6. Open your own listing on every delivery platform. Compare the same five items and record the gap per item.
7. Read a real bill top to bottom. Every line the guest could not have seen before ordering is a finding, whatever its name.
8. Write down who owns each surface. Not "the manager" — a person, for card, board, window, website, ordering flow, and each platform.

Step eight decides whether the other seven repeat next quarter or never happen again. Most venues fail this audit not through a wrong decision but because six surfaces have no owner and drift apart. The same pattern runs through restaurant automation across reservations, suppliers and reviews and through the numbers an owner actually looks at: the failure is rarely the number, it is the absence of a named owner for it.

Where a machine helps, and where this is plain arithmetic

Steps 4 and 6 are arithmetic. Counting menu lines and subtracting one price from another needs no model and no prediction — a spreadsheet and twenty minutes will do it, and any page that dresses that up as intelligence is selling something.

What software genuinely changes is the repetition: pulling both price lists on a schedule and flagging only what drifted, so a human reads six lines instead of two hundred. That is the job of an integrations layer between till, website and platforms, and of analytics on the result; keeping the public listing correct where guests actually read it, maps included, belongs to the venue's business profile. None of these tools interpret the acts. A duty is read by a person; a discrepancy is found by a machine.

Frequently asked questions

Can a restaurant in Poland refuse cash?

Not as a general policy toward consumers. The act on payment services says the merchant may not make a consumer contract dependent on cashless payment and may not refuse NBP banknotes (art. 59ea ust. 1). Ust. 2 names four situations where that rule does not apply, and those four are the whole of the exception — read them in the act, not in a summary.

What exactly does the payment services act say about it?

Art. 59ea ust. 1 forbids two things at once: conditioning a consumer contract on cashless payment, and refusing NBP banknotes. Ust. 3 adds that no fee may be charged for accepting cash and that the price may not differ by form of payment. The Polish wording is in the consolidated text, Dz.U. 2026 poz. 623.

Are there exceptions to the cash acceptance duty?

Yes, in the provision itself: art. 59ea ust. 2, four numbered points. This page deliberately does not restate them — a copy drifts from the act at the first amendment, and one of the four is tied to a statistical figure that changes during the year. Read them in the consolidated text against your own situation.

Is a "card only" sign the same as a legal exception?

No. The sign states your behaviour; an exception is a state of affairs described in art. 59ea ust. 2. If your situation falls inside one of those four points, the sign merely announces it. If not, the sign creates no permission — it records in public that consumer cash is refused outside the cases the provision allows.

Must a unit price be displayed on drinks?

The duty in art. 4 ust. 1 covers the price and the unit price of a good or service whose quantity is expressed in a unit of measure — exactly the situation of drinks sold in several volumes. A regulation under art. 4 ust. 6 sets a list of goods where the unit price is not required; it was not opened for this page, so nothing here declares any item exempt. Check that list, then measure coverage on the lines where it is meaningful.

Where does the price have to be visible?

At the place of retail sale and of providing services, unambiguously, raising no doubt and allowing comparison (art. 4 ust. 1). For a venue that means the card and the board first, then every surface where an item is advertised together with a price — window, website, ordering flow — because art. 4 ust. 5 applies the same rules to advertising with a price, and art. 6 ust. 1 penalises the whole range of art. 4 ust. 1–5.

Can the delivery platform price differ from the dine-in price?

Two price lists in two channels are not in themselves a breach, and there are ordinary commercial reasons for them. What matters is that the guest sees the applicable price before ordering in that channel. On a discrepancy or doubt, art. 5 gives the consumer the right to demand the most favourable price — so an undisclosed gap is not a pricing decision, it is a decision to sell at the lower of your two.

Walk your own counter with a guest's eyes: is the price visible before the order, is the unit price there on the drinks, does what hangs on your door match what the provision allows. Then give every surface an owner — the restaurant section collects the rest of the operational and legal ground for a Polish venue, one duty at a time.