note that in the string of posts, when Revention replies, no name is listed…just “product manager”…they hide behind walls and again I state, they can’t be trusted…
What he said.
Buyer Beware.
I have been a Revention Customer since 2005.
The bottom line is no one can beat their service.
When you call you get a live person to help you. Not a anwsering maching and get a call after hours or even never. If you run a high volume store or want to become high volume.Revention is the only choice.
You get what you pay for. Nothing is free in this world. They are on top of all the lastest trends. And are more than happy to accomadated you. I have Revention at my 8 locations and any future i will open. What else can i say , ease of use, My family has been in this business for more than 30 years and Revention make life much easier.
FYI
Our first system Rapid Fire( outdated)
Tried Firefly POS at 1 store( disaster)
Bobby Athanasakis
Manny & Olga's PizzaHere is my 2 1/2 year experience and if I could do it all over again I would choose another POS system.
I am going to be truthful in this post. You will see both their good and bad points. If you can live with their bad points then I would recommend them. I just think when you spend over $30,000 there should be no bad point.
First I spent over $30,000 on the pos system in March of 2009 at the pizza expo in Las Vegas. I was told it could do everything I needed. I didn’t like the reporting system. Not very well designed for Pizza Delivery. The food cost was not integrated. I was assured that the problem was being addressed and within a few months the reports would be more like my old National System pos. The reporting system still isn’t even close to the old National system.
Well after starting the setup with software team they discovered that it couldn’t do my pizza pricing. They said if I could wait they would rewrite the software to work. Which they did and the pricing works great.
When they were installing the system I had security concerns with the way it was connected to the INTERNET was was told all was fine.
We find out this year that the system isn’t in PCI compliance. Reventions wants over $5,000 to bring the system into compliance.
I feel that when you spend $30,000 on a POS system that the system should last about 5 years. If not 5, at least 3 before a upgrade is needed. If you do the math, not counting interest the cost of the system over 3 years is $833 per month. Now add the $100 per month for support (which you will use a lot) and $55 for online ordering that totals almost $1000 per month spent on your POS system.
After I had paid for a full year of support and software updates, I was told they will not upgrade my software unless I spend the $5,000 to change out all my hard drives and become PCI compliant.
I have tried and requested that a simple column be added to the Hourly sales report I think all store need. A hourly labor percent column. How do you know when your store is wasting their labor if you can’t see the hourly labor percent?
As far as the PCI compliance, I feel the company should of known that their system wasn’t secure. As I said at first, I felt there were some security problems and I’m not even a computer person. I feel they should make this right by their customers and fix the problem at their cost not ours. I feel they should be able to close the INTERNET security threat, run a scan on each hard drive and get their systems back into compliance. Not charge us $5,000 to get all new hard drives!
To sum it all up:
Order taking; Great
Reporting: Bad
Support: average
Cost of ownership: Very Bad
Standing by their mistakes: Very Bad
Steven Tolhurst
Pizza Time
Lawton, OK
I just have to chime in here…
I have been with Revention since May 09. I have had my own ups and downs but none of them have been unresolved.
I made a choice after testing FireFly for what seemed like months (it was not able to even keep up with a Friday night dinner rush) to check out Speedline and Revention.
Speedline was not fully ready for my type of operation (no makeline display) and that put the brakes on any further discussions.
Initial install was scary as I had been with TMS National systems for nearly 20 years. I was the guinea pig for our whole chain with Revention. Getting through the first weeks we documented everything. Guess what? They listened and added/created reports we were missing from our other system.
3 more systems installed in June. I was pretty happy with everything until the term “PCI” started getting tossed around…
PCI Compliency is real for all of us and if we have any type of advanced POS then we will have to have some upgrades.
As I stated before I had installed FireFly and with that I had purchased a huge lot of Dell Workstations. Not being a big fan of losing money I decided to install Revention on them. No issue until PCI…since the solution involves swapping out HDD’s.
I did just do the PCI conversion in my 1 store that had Revention workstations and at the end of the process things could not have gone smoother. I have now been able to get the updated versions of the software as well and many advancements are already proving useful.
This is my first investment back into the system since it’s original purchase and if you compare it to other investments in your store - ovens, makeline, etc. if the original purchase was $25,000 and I had to spend $2800 ($1000 will be returned to me once the original HDD’s are returned to them) so $1800 over almost 3 years seems like a no brainer.
I would recommend them and I will do it again in the future - dont get me wrong I get aggrevated from time to time, but when cooler heads prevail they are there to help me!
Put it this way - some people like The Who and some like Led Zeppelin and some like Black Sabbath. Nobody is wrong there…but they are all different experiences.
If you want to PM me about Revention my response will be the same.
I’ve had pdq for 6 years now and have been using it on and off for 15. Their Customer Service is not terrible anymore, but the owner is a piece of !!@%@%@%#!
Total Dick! Real feedback, not from a used car salesman thanks.
We have been using Speedline for about 7 years and looking at a major expense in replacing the hardware in the near future. This reality has us looking at other POS systems and Revention keeps popping up as a possible replacement. Looking to hear from those who switched from Speedline to Revention and hear what you gained and what you might miss with the switch. No “testimonials” from company reps PLEASE.
I am a current Revention user, never used Speedline before. But if it is the hardware cost alone that has you looking to switch, you do realize you will need to spend them same amount on Revention hardware?
If you don’t mind being forced to pay for any kind of support, even the simplest of questions and even only weeks after dropping a huge amount of money on the product, then Revention is a good system.
Been using them for about 9 months and had a random software glitch one day that wouldn’t allow me to process cards (you can read other people talking about similar situations online) so I called them to see what the deal was. No support contract? You’re on your own. Three days after you got the system installed? Who cares. Pay up buddy or figure it out yourself.
In today’s world shit like that is a huge turnoff for me, especially after dropping tens of thousands of dollars for a system that essentially broke itself. Luckily I have an extensive database administration background so I was able to fix the problems myself without shelling out the hundreds of dollars per question, or “event” that these guys wanted.
Look, I get support contracts and I understand how support systems work, but what I don’t get is how you can charge someone the price of an automobile and be a dick about fixing a problem they didn’t even cause. How many industries can you think of that get away with this type of nonsense?
So that said, no, I personally will never recommend Revention to anyone.
To add to noreason’s comment, when i bought my store it was using Revention. After about 9 months a glitch occurred that prevented me from running the daily ops only on the currently open day. 2 years later, they claimed to have fixed it 4 times (and i have been thru at least 4 updates, of which 2 i refused and forced them to back port me because of issues).
If i had the time and money, i would move to a new POS.
About three years ago we upgraded from Micros to Revention and love the move. The problem with Revention is about a year after we installed the system it would start slowing down on Friday and Saturday nights during our rush. When I called support they told me that I need to upgrade the memory. After this it was still was slow. Next they had me purchase a new terminal, still slow. Finally, they had me purchase a server station. This still has not solved the problem.
When I called back this summer they told me they would have a tier 3 support look at. About 3 months later I got a call asking about the case and he told me it never got assigned to anyone. Now, last week, I get a call from another Revention rep asking me if they could close the case. I explained nothing has been fixed, he recommended I should just call back and open a new one. I feel like this would be starting over.
Our Revention system is slow that on weekends it will freeze for an extanted period of time and is getting worse every weekend. This issue has forced us to start looking for a new system. It would be a great system for us if it was not for the issue of it being so slow. This is my caution on the system.
Do you ever reboot your server ? And is it running XP or 7 ? From a computer stand point this sounds like a memory leak problem, which windows is horrendous about not properly releasing memory.
Also you might try running defrag on the hard drive or at the very least scandisk to check for bad sectors. Just a few thoughts for you to try out.
Edit: Have you ever done a backup of your database ? Reventions database is system is flawed, if it gets to big it starts causing all sorts of problems. (i routinely back up mine every 6 months)
All the POS Systems seem to have issues. It sounds like most of the Reps just try and sell new equipment to customers who are already customers. In other words, just service your customers already instead of trying to rip them off!
We have gradually replaced our POS systems with Microworks. We have about a 4 year history with them. No complaints. Our experience has been good support and good communication. We have had two glitches in four years. One was not even their fault and the other was fixed asap.
Others here have mentioned aloha and Firefly. Aloha, in our area, is serviced by a company in San Diego. Not sure if this has changed. Pretty good system but the company in San Diego really does not give a crap. Firefly? When Granbury bought them it all went to crap. We had three locations with Firefly at that time and have now replaced them with Microworks along with newer location installs. Firefly has so many security leaks that one day a manager of ours called and said the restaurant had been shut down and the police were there. I immediately went there to check. The sheriff’s department and the FBI were there. They had my employees lined up against the wall to intimidate them. They were sure that one or more of my employees were selling credit card numbers. I knew all of the employees at that location and most all of them had been there for many years. No way they would do this. When it all settled out I was told that passwords were obtained from tech people at Firefly. The FBI had me do a transaction with my personal credit card. The next morning there were three transactions in Georgia on my card. I am in California. The FBI took my hard drive. I got it back a few months later.
I’ve had Revention now for almost 2 years and I love it. I pay for the support contract, it was a given when I got the system and I knew the cost to me before getting into it. Perhaps a 6 month or 1 year of free support would serve them well with customer relations… I think issues are rarely caused by the user so having a problem with the system not of your doing and having to pay to get it fixed would be pretty maddening. The cost never bothered me because I accepted before I jumped into bed with them… I mean, these are not unknowns before you sign the paperwork.
My experience with all Windows computers is that they slow down over time. If your performance problem is related to hardware and you have the option to do so, replacing your current mechanical hard disk with an SSD (solid state drive) will dramatically improve the computer’s performance. RAM upgrades only make a difference if the computer is running multiple programs simultaneously that need to be swapped in and out of memory to let them run. You can clone the existing hard drive when you replace it with an SSD so there is very little work or downtime involved. I don’t know if your Revention software will work with a hard disk swap but it’s something to look into.
Avoid FireFly and Thrive! from Grandbury. The most buggy software on early. We sell POS printers, cash drawers and touch screens and help restaurants set them up on their POS systems. Even the Granbury techs tell us how problematic the software is.
I highly recommend Speedline solutions. Revention would be my second pick for Pizza POS.
Kevin@posshopper.com
How about Point of success? I’ve seen you vouch for them in other threads
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I have not taken a close look at Point of Success in years. Jeff is a very up front individual to work with. They had some printing limitations, from my perspective, 7 years ago. This may have changed. The key to success, when using Point of Success, is selecting a good “independent dealer”. Point of success themselves only offers support from 8:00 am - 5:00 pm Monday - Friday Mountain Standard Time. Support outside of those hours comes from your independent dealer. Because restaurants make most of their money at night and on weekends, choosing the right independent dealer can be critical.
I’ve written an article “Choosing the Best POS Software and Provider” for your business. It would be worth your time to read.
Best of luck
Kevin@posshopper.com