Choosing
It is not the size of the premises that decides, it is the way you serve. Five questions to ask yourself before looking at a single price.
The first question people ask us is almost always the wrong one: “which brand?” The right one, the one that settles everything else, fits into a single sentence: where does an order travel, from the moment the customer says it to the moment it is made?
Answer that one and half the choice is made. The hardware follows from the service, the software follows from the hardware, and the price comes last — not first. What follows is the order in which we ask the questions during an audit, and it has never started with the price.
At the counter it is born and made in the same place. At the table it has to travel: a handheld terminal or a notepad, then a printer in the kitchen. For takeaway it arrives before the customer does. Three routes, three sets of equipment — and often all three in the same business.
On the coast the team changes faster than the menu. A sales screen in Spanish for someone who does not speak it costs one mistake per service. Check that the language is set per user, not once for the whole terminal.
Software is judged at half past one, not in a demo. How many taps for a modified dish, a split bill, a refund? Those are the three cases that cost time, and they are the ones nobody ever demonstrates.
The payment terminal, the kitchen printer, your accountant's software, sometimes an online shop. Every link is checked before it is promised: “compatible” is not “connected”.
The vendor's support is online, often in English, and it will not come out to plug a cash drawer back in. Ask who travels out, within what time, and what it costs. It is the line people look at least and use most.
The season. A good share of the year is decided in four months. A system discovered in June has no time to be learned; the same one, installed in February, reaches high season already run in.
The team that turns over. If the POS cannot be learned in half an hour, it will be paid for every summer. A screen covered in buttons impresses in a demo and costs dearly on the first full service.
Languages, at the counter and on the screen. Spanish, English, French, German: sometimes all four in the same service. The question applies to the menu, to the receipts, and to the software itself.
The network, which is not always yours. In a shopping centre or an older unit, the connection is shared. Ask in writing what the software does when it drops: does it still take payments, and what becomes of what was entered during the outage?
A fifteen-square-metre counter doing a hundred takeaway covers demands more than a sixty-seat room served à la carte. It is throughput and mode of service that count, not floor area.
An advertising budget is not a compatibility. The right question is not “who is best known” but “who does what I do, here”.
A demo that shows forty features mostly shows that thirty-five of them will never be used, and that they clutter the screen of the people doing the work.
It is one line out of five. The vendor's licence says nothing about hardware, payment fees, options or installation.
Ask for a demo where you are the one holding the screen, with your own menu and your own prices, not the demo catalogue. Then run three scenarios, in this order:
Count the taps. Then have someone who has never seen the software do the same: that is who will be on the till in August. A system that passes this test is worth its price; a system that fails it is paid for twice.
A point of sale on the Costa del Sol: the season, the languages, the hardware
An audit of the service as it actually runs, before a single hardware reference.
