We are hoping to have our POS up and running within the next 6 weeks, I have decided on Point of Success software (premium) and have been researching different hardware options/brands as well as add-ons. We have decided that we will need: PC tower, touchscreen monitor, printer for kitchen, printer for front desk, CC reader, cash drawer. I have a few questions regarding Point of Success for current users:
How difficult, technically speaking, was it to setup your menu? How long did this process take? Our menu consists of pizza, appetizers, salads, subs and ribs as well as 2 meal deals and one daily special and I am worried that one full day to set it up may not be enough.
If you purchased add-ons such as Inventory, Employee Scheduling/Time keeping, Menu Setup/Training CD which ones have you found these to be useful given the extra cost? I am very interested in the inventory functionality which I see as a potential huge time saver.
After looking through this forum it seems that Elo is the most reliable and longest lasting touchscreen have you found another brand to be superior? If anyone is using an HP, has it been working well for you?
Besides POSWorld, what other companies have yo used for POS hardware?
Any other advice you all may have on going from good ole pen and paper to a POS would be much appreciated, anything you wish you knew before hand, etc! Thanks!
We’re a Point of Success family here and still believe for our store, it’s the best option. I had the luxury of having my computer savvy son do most of the initial programing…then my business savvy son did away with all of that and put it all into “easy to use” form! Some folks think one way…some the other.
We are full menu, pizza is about 12-15% of our total food sales. We also do a full sandwich, salad, pasta, entrees, desserts, and have over 30 american craft beers on our menu along with 9 rotating on tap. P.O.S. handles them all with ease! WE don’t do coupons and bundling by habit…but the few times we have tossed together a special, coming up with a “button” to handle them was a 2 minute process.
We change up our beer “buttons” on the fly sometimes as we pull a new offering out of the walk-in, and it’s NO problem to adjust the menu. The staff, many who had worked with POS systems before are impressed with the ease of use and extremely intuitive functionality of the system.
Building our menu was about a 2 day process…depending on how quick of a study you are, your computer skills and of course the breadth of your menu I don’t think it would take any longer than that for most anyone.
We sourced equipment from well, my old home eMachine desktop that was maybe 5 years old, that’s our “server”. Our screens are all ELO and all came off of Ebay. They seem to have gone up in price of late, but are still a deal. The 3 work stations are IBM cast offs that I got at Ebay for $75-$100 a pop. Our printers, all Ebay, and our cash drawer and card reader…yup, Ebay. I’ve got under $2000 in the whole system. The only thing not from Ebay and preowned was the cable and I think a couple of the work stations had to have some sort of different “powered USB” drive thingie…but that’s my computer son’s thing.
The number one selling feature of Point of Success in my opinion is…Jeff Ward. Don’t know him, don’t work for him…but any of the FEW times I had a question about P.O.S. (and EVERY instance was MY FAULT btw) he or Kathy in the office was bending over backwards to help me figure it all out! The ability to speak with ‘the guy’, the fact they maintain an extensive data base of knowledge and the users’ forum online…priceless.
I have to agree with this statement 100%. The only additional advice I can give is purchase the training DVD it is worth every penny and more.
As far as equipment goes I chose to get new Dell machines and they have been running for nearly 7 years now. I did recently upgrade the server and have had to replace one touch screen monitor. As a former IT tech this was the most user friendly setup I was able to find on the market.
I’ve been hooked up with Point of Success for almost 2 months now.
It took me a bit longer to set up our menu. I didn’t have any experience with this sort of set up before and the menu builder CD was necessary to help me complete it. It took me about 2 weeks sitting in the back room and working on it on and off between orders.
The scheduling and time keeping software have been great add-ons. I purchased them when they had a bundle deal. I also have the central point remote and the Big Holler integration that I haven’t done anything with yet. (Planning to add online ordering in January and will use Central Point remote when I don’t work every minute that we’re open).
I just stole a monitor from home and use it with a keyboard and mouse. I’ll upgrade to touchscreen someday but honestly, this method is a lot faster and more convenient than I thought it would be.
I went through a local company to buy my printer and cash drawer. I went directly through Dell and bought a new tower. I only have one unit and we just print everything off one printer and hand the tickets back to the kitchen.
Only having one system can stretch us thin on Friday and Saturday nights. But we get by and the budget wasn’t there to add any more. If someone needs to answer the second phone line, they will still fill out the order on pen and paper and then we transfer it to the POS.
One thing I’m just figuring out is that we need to start organizing our coupons better. Right now we’ve got a lot of different discounts set up and they are starting to get challenging to find. I’m thinking that having coupon codes could solve this problem and I’ll start integrating that the next time I put out a new coupon somewhere.
The Point of Success RoundTable and knowledge base are good resource to have as well. I was able to ask a lot of “newbie” questions and get answers within a few hours. http://www.posroundtable.com/ http://www.pointofsuccess.com/kb.htm
Thank you all for your in-depth, thorough responses, I really appreciate them! Right now, I am in the process of getting all the hardware purchased and have decided on an Elo touchscreen, a thermal printer in the front, a dot matrix in the kitchen, and a server tower all which will be purchased on Ebay. I’m a little apprehensive about buying a used computer on Ebay but we just don’t have the budget to buy a whole new tower right now. I’m so excited to get everything up and running, I’ll post on how my experience goes with it as well!
Part of me says it is a really neat package and for $400.00 you get the touch screen and CPU with Win7. The other part of me says you get all the negatives of a laptop without the portability.
I tried one and returned it to Costco after 2 days. The touch screen is not designed for a POS system. I found that the response time after touching was a bit slow, this caused a problem with topping being added or deleted in error. There was also a problem because you didn’t actually have to touch the screen, just putting your finger close to it would move the cursor to where your finger was.
I also have tried the touch screen laptops and they suffered from the same problems mentioned above.
YES!! I love this terminal, I am a pos dealer. We offer a customer the following terminals:
15.5" Asus all in one
15" or 17" Elo all in one terminal (these are very pricey, but they are indestructible!)
21.5" Gateway all in one.
The Gateway is by far my favorite, it does take a few minutes to get used to the cursor moving when you get your finger within about .5" but once you get used to it, its no big deal. I love this terminal because it has such a huge screen, enabling you to put everything on the main screen and eliminating the need for a bunch of sub menus (some find this type of design more confusing). This computer also features 4GB or ram and a great processor. Overall it is super fast, beautiful and very responsive.
I deployed 3 of these at a site back in November and they love them!
We also use 'Point of Success" and are very pleased with its ease of use and set-up.
Hardware; I was going to build a system from a barebones kit, but while wanderign through walmart I saw an HP mid-tower for $298.00 with some impressive specs, got it cheaper than building my own with similar performance benchmarks
Monitor; A few years back Newegg had 21" HP touchscreens for $179.00, Got one and hung on to it, use it on the POS with great results.
3 Printers; 2 Star Micronics 700 series impact printers and one tsp100 thermal
It took me about 2 hours to set up our menu, we added a laser scanner for bottled drinks, and our next addition is scale integration.
Love their product, love their technical support, and love latest version.
I did not get the training CD, but I will be shortly as we expand our offerings and labor force.