Frank,
I’ll answer your PM here in case it helps others. I’m incredibly happy with Point of Success. You will want to purchase the Inventory add on. In hindsight, I would just input every item new into it from scratch. We set up a way to just import all items from my other POS’s database, but the systems were so different that I ended up going back and changing things and spent just as much time as I probably would have anyway. But now things don’t look exactly the way I want them to like they would if I had just input them myself. I ran into a few glitches in the beginning that I can’t remember what they were off the top of my head. I think though that they were just from changing my mindset from my old system to the new. I like the new system much better, especially when I deal with the old system at our other location that is just a general store only. Eventually, I’d like to switch it over to Point of Success too, but the other system works just well enough that it’s not worth the hassle right now. But it runs on old technology and Point of Success is what we need going forward. The only thing I wish it had that our old one had would be a look-up function right from the sales screen to look up pricing on an item without scanning it. But that is a very minor thing and you can look it up with a few clicks to the manager program. The only other thing I would like to see better is for the reports to be a little easier to tweak to my liking. They offer custom report building for a charge. But really, with how much cheaper the system is from comparable systems, I could probably buy dozens and dozens of custom reports and still come out ahead.
I can’t vouch for the delivery system as we are carryout and dine in only. But from what I have seen of it, it seems to have a pretty good system in place and many other people seem quite happy with it.
I don’t know how their distributors break down regionally, but my contact through A Custom POS, William, came highly recommended and they weren’t exaggerating. He has been an amazing help getting everything set up and answering all my dumb questions at all hours of the day or night. Even if he doesn’t serve your area, I see many company reps on this board and their own messageboard community being very helpful with all kinds of situations.
I haven’t activated online ordering yet, but it seems like a good deal. I’m always a little cautious when I’m only given one option, Big Hollar, to tie into the POS, but all the research I’ve done on it seems like it’s a good option. People seem to like it and it seems just as if not more affordable than all the other options out there.
The customer recall system is pretty good. I wish there was a way to combine customers in the system though without deleting. For example, they call and we take their phone number. They may give us the house phone one call and their cell the next time and we don’t realize it until later. We could always just delete the entry and add the number to the other, but then I would lose the order history. But that is a minor thing for us.
Mercury is their preferred provider and I think you need to buy an add-on to use someone else, but we already used Mercury and were happy with them so it was a seamless transition for us.
I think that answers all your questions. If not let me know and I’ll get back to you. Overall, I’m very happy with how it handles both aspects of our business and strongly recommend it to anyone who asks. You can download and use the basic version for free if I recall correctly. Actually, be sure to verify all of this I’m saying with a sales rep. I could be wrong on some things, but that’s how I remember setting it all up.
Good luck. And let us know what you come up with.