Revel Systems reviews

Great

Pluspunten:

It's easy to learn and accessible. Having it on an Ipad means that it's large enough to know what button is being pressed, and to move things around if need be. Having categories set up is great so we can keep track of how much change we need or how many people came in to visit the museum, that day.

Minpunten:

It can get a little complicated especially with adding discounts to certain purchases which can be difficult for our older volunteers to get a hold of. But is really it, on the basic side of things, it works well and does the job efficiently.

Extensive functionality

Opmerkingen: Despite the technical issues, our experience with Revel has been great due to its user-friendliness and extensive functionality.

Pluspunten:

Revel has a lot of features that allow us to easily keep track of our visitor numbers and inventory. The system is very easy for our staff to use and it requires very little training.

Minpunten:

We have run into numerous technical issues with Revel and their customer service has not been very helpful when resolving some issues.

Hidden in the Terms and conditions

Opmerkingen: Terrible, we had been using it for a year, the previous owner had it installed for years before that.We were recently told that they are moving away from tyro, which is a major payment system in Australia , which was the first issue since Tyro are the best value around for eftpos machineThen not long after a pop up appeared when we logged in, stating that they had new Terms and conditions ( will attached if possible) which when you look at it its very standard, this happens from time to time. And you click YESWhat they dont tell you is that in the T&C's there are sticking you up for 36 months contract, this practice is deceptive since you have to go looking for this extension deep in the text of the T&C's.

Pluspunten:

Overall they have all the same features as all other POS systems

Minpunten:

Zero customer service, they are based in the US

Revel, the good and the bad

Opmerkingen: Helpful with keeping track of sales and labor. Easy to learn and easy to train new employees on.

Pluspunten:

Easy to use and set up. The reports are pretty good. As a simple POS and time keeping system, it works well

Minpunten:

If you need a POS that will help you with in depth inventory control, this is probably not the system for you

I own a restaurant and we use Revel as our POS.

Pluspunten:

I like the view of the menu the most. It allows you to easily select products and add additional items, if you need to.

Minpunten:

The customer service is horrible. If you have any issues with the system, good luck to you and block off at least an hour.

We use it in a coffee shop, and it has helped a lot.

Pluspunten:

You can program it to accept tips on charge card which increased the barista's tips. IT was a lot better than our previous system.

Minpunten:

The backend stuff is hard to figure out and the customer service isn't the best. Also you need quite a bit of training to be comfortable with using it on a day to day basis.

Revel = Overpriced, dishonest and corrupt.

Opmerkingen: Its terrible that a company can operate in this day and age with such dishonesty - from hiding costs, failing to supply agreements yet embedding them in a url link in the fine print to obscure it, Order forms that order monthly subscriptions then you find out it has a three year term that was never disclosed, sales men that tell you to contact their providers of equipment to get a price, sales men that lie and wont stand by their own word. Then you have the 15k cancellation fee for the 3 year contract you were never advised you had. Customer service teams that don't communicate and pass you off to each other to further yet obscure you from getting any value. A disgraceful company, shame the software is ok, they are now just a greedy corporation with no appreciation or view of their customers. With this company they customer is always wrong and they will tell you so. Overpriced dishonest and corrupt.

Pluspunten:

Back End Management software is good. Nice use of iPad.

Minpunten:

Un-Intuitive setup. Most expensive iPad POS software in the market does not provide value for money.

Maybe not for restaurant

Opmerkingen: The system was easy to learn, thanks god because there is no onsite help and if you have a problem you have to resolve it with and onl the phone operator! That can be time consuming and frustrating if you are not very technologically friendly.

Pluspunten:

Easy to use. Easy to learn staff friendly have a portable option, reliable enough. Use iPad and doesn’t take too much space.

Minpunten:

Not set up toward restaurant, long orders arrive in the kitchen, with no clear consolidation of the order, making it difficult to work with big parties. And few little similar problems, that make you think, this system was not developed for restaurant

****AVOID**** EXTREMELY POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SCALES NOT ADAPTED TO RETAIL BUSINESSES

Pluspunten:

The overall experience has been extremely poor so there is actually nothing I would say that is positive about Revel

Minpunten:

Revel customer service is extremely slow, as explained by someone else, you get to exchange emails with about 10 different people and no one knows what they are talking about. The average answer time from them is 5 days. I have a deli in London, and I have been sold Revel as a great POS that would easily work with Quickbooks, which I am using. They provided me with their integrated scale, which was unable to weigh goods that were below 100g. Also, ti was rounding up so a cheese that would weigh 123g would come up as 125g, which is illegal. I notified them and asked for a full refund (including the £2300 set up fee) , which they refused, whereas it is their fault if their scales are not fit for a business like mine. DO NOT WORK WITH THIS BUNCH OF AMATEURS AND THIEVES

Good POS system

Opmerkingen: Very good functionality and high quality reporting system. I think this one one of the most advanced POS systems I have used.

Pluspunten:

Revel is user friendly and I love that we can use it with iPads.

Minpunten:

There are some glitches and system can freeze from time to time. I have also had difficulties with our other software that integrates with Revel. The two systems often stop communicating with each other.

One they get your money, you'll get neither a functional system nor customer service

Opmerkingen: The customer service is abysmal. Once the sale is made, you are chopped liver and the company really doesn't even seem to care if your system ever gets up and running after that point.

Pluspunten:

I can see exactly what we sold on a certain day. They look impressive so despite the fact that they have low functionality they look really pretty....but, lets be honest....that's mostly the ipad.

Minpunten:

Notice how it's spelled rEVEL. (it's illiterate evil with an R). Things I though rEVEL would do but it doesn't, problems we have, and why you shouldn't purchase revel for your establishment. 1. When you set up a customer, they are not automatically set up to collect reward points. Your staff have to create a rewards card separately, then link it to the customer. We've had lots of input errors because of this. The customer and reward points numbers are a customers phone number, which means that if they change their phone number you have to change their customer number. Then deactivate their rewards card number. Then create a new rewards card. Then go to the back end and download the entire customer matrix, insert the number of reward points they should have under their new number, then upload all of the data back into the system. Something that you can only do when you are closed for the day. So many things with revel are like this. Something that should be simple is the most cumbersome thing ever. 2. Customers cant fill in their own information on the customer facing display which leads to lots of inputting errors. 3. The only way collected customer emails link into your email program is if you pay a hefty monthly fee (per pos station) for a third party app. 4. If a customer chooses to have their receipt emailed to them, the system does not collect that email and sync it to their customer identification. 5. In Canada here, there are no Province options when filling out customer details so we can't even collect their address properly. 6. Want to send a coupon to your top 50 customers? Good luck There is no report that you can run for that. Tons of data. No way to mine it. Have fun paying a third party to mine your data for you. 7. Want to know who purchased an item on a specific day? Once again, all this data, with no reports to mine it. 8. GLITCHY! Open orders hanging open, customer reward points not being accrued correctly, and weird little things like pop up balloons that slow down transaction time by 5 seconds, customer list not being alphabetical, orders re-opening hours later showing few cents owing on it, lag time between info going up to the cloud and back down to the stations. (a customer wants to exchange something they bought 5 minutes ago? They have to go to the same pos station they bought it at as the sale will not show up on the other stations for hours). Items that we sell by the each suddenly show an inventory of 1.86 units, where did that .14 of a unit go? 9. CUMBERSOME, the procedures for creating gift cards, processing returns, creating a customer, linking that customer to a reward card. All of it is just so damned cumbersome, takes so many taps on the ipad and is not intuitive....even for our millennial cashiers. 10. The sales people flat out lie. I asked really specific functionality questions from our sales person, who flat out lied about the systems capabilities. Then dropped us like a hot potato once he had our money. I spent the next month chasing Revel to make sure that the install happened before we opened. This attitude of sale first, customer service last, follows through. The hubs that they sold us are glitchy and faulty. We complained about them for a full year. Then we got an email offering us their new and improved network hubs. So basically they sold me crap. Knew that they sold me something that didn't work. Then offered a discount on selling the replacement to me. 11. The Customer Management system does very little. Once again, we had to pay a third party to figure out who our top customers were, then go through their profiles one by one to gather their emails to send them all an email to offer them a reward for being a top customer. 12. You can't redeem multiple rewards at once, or process a refund without a customer making a purchase(we sell milk in reusable glass bottles that the customer gets money back when they bring back their bottle, you can't process this if they just come back to return the bottle without making a purchase), or or process two refunds and a reward under the same transaction. So many glitchy things. 13. Someone will reply to this saying there are no open tickets on our account. And this is true. Because the reply to all of these things is that the feature doesn't exist and I should put in a request for a new feature. Which I have done. Repeatedly over the last 3 years. And here we are, still calling revel support asking why if you sell systems in Canada can I not enter a Canadian address in the system. 14. Poorly trained staff. We are a seasonal business and each spring when we open up, we have to have revel support enter some identification numbers on the back end to have their system work with our payment processor monaris (the only one they offer). It always takes several weeks of my calling back and sitting on hold to get this simple thing done. Every time. This is what it's like calling revel every time. I'm sure that there are lots of weird glitchy things with every system out there but revel really appears as though it was built poorly from the outset and has software flaws that can not be changed. One of my managers spends 10-20 hours per week working on fixing revel errors, calling customer service, figuring out how the system works now that there is another update, writing detailed training manuals for our staff to us the system. It's just so time consumptive and terrible. It makes it all the worse that revel folks just repeat the party line and don't actually look for solutions to the system problems. "Fill in a feature request form" It's like they've all drunk the kool-aid and have become automatons controlled by an evil wizard named Revel.

Stay away this program

Opmerkingen: We are existing Revel System customer but I think our 2 year relationship is going to be an end. Changing a POS system is not simple but we still choose to leave must have our reasons. I just want to share my experiences with everyone who might consider marry to them. 1. We were told from their sale rep the QuickBooks integration will 100% work for Canadian customer because of this reason we signed off the deal, however we don't have a chance to test the integration because it was still under development, we should wait till the launch but we can't wait because we need a new system to support our grow. We did reconfirm the QB compatibility again and again so we don't think there will be a problem. We got everything setup and running, about few months later the QuickBooks Integration finally launched but they told us this feature strictly for US customer only?! This case only escalated to their sales team lead and they refused to go further higher, you have no easy way to reach their upper management team unfortunately we dun have any recording or email for the proof, they only offer a free month to settle the case. They would guarantee you everything at the beginning and once you in everything is just too late, we have learned a lesson. 2. We are not pleased and disappointed on how Revel handle system upgrade, almost every single incident causes us problem and certain level of business impact, we need to bend or change our business model/process to fit these updates. Revel introduce new feature but at the same time take away the old feature immediately, can you imagine how much trouble causing? For example we never had an option call “Credit Limit”, after the latest mandatory POS upgrade on iPad (this is another matter will mention after), we are forced to commit the new changes, we can no longer take "House Account" credit payment until we enable the "Credit Limit" option inside customer, but this is not the major problem, I am so shocking they don't provide a batch upload method, instead we are instructed to make this change inside each customer one by one, we have thousands of customers are on account. This is so ridiculous but why they can't just keep thing simple? 3. The Revel POS consist by two pieces, the frontend (iPad) and the backend (web management). Periodically they roll out major upgrade (notified) or small updates (silence) at the backend and then you must follow their schedule to download and re-install the new iPad App manually during off business hour to match your backend version, otherwise your iPad POS will not function properly 4. They have very slow development, usually the iOS App should be prepared and updated on device before the new iOS launch, but Revel work reversely, they will tell you DO NOT upgrade your iPad iOS Software whenever until they ready. They need to understand you cannot disable system update on iPad, until some point you will get the software update reminder popup crazy everyday on the iPad and you must choose "remind me/install later" to bypass but couple times my staffs by accidently hit the wrong button and fire up the software update, then the till will be out of service until we reach Revel support for fix. I cannot blame on my staffs in this case, Revel have to do something to avoid this to happen. 4. Support - their level 1 support is useless, even level 2 not really helpful, the most words I have heard are "Sorry" or "This is the system design, nothing we can do". I don’t need a sorry. I have a strong feeling their development teams make whatever changes they want without thinking the impacts would brought up to the customers. 5. The most funniest thing is Revel have a Voice of Customer team to hear your feedback, this is cool, they do reach out you to hear your problems or complaints but limited to listen only! They don't follow up anymore, I have one phone conservation and one email both sink into the deep sea, sigh* Good luck!

Revel Systems for Table Service Lacks VERY VERY VERY Basic Tip Report for Servers

Opmerkingen: Before you buy Revel ask the sales rep to try to print a basic tip report with a server log in prior to batching out at the end of the day. It's not currently possible unless you give your server full financial access.

Pluspunten:

Revel Systems syncs with Quickbooks better than any other system I'm aware of. They most often sell the equipment with higher-end networking and wireless access points such as Meraki or Ubiquiti whereas others use residential Netgear, Linksys, or TP Link which jeopardizes the stability of using a tablet as your POS.

Minpunten:

This oversight by Revel is ridiculous. However, are you table service and do you need your servers or other employees to take credit card tips out of the cash drawer at the end of their shift? Or leave a receipt in the drawer of how much they took out? If so it's not currently possible with Revision 2.22.9-61 or below for a server to print a basic tip report (unless you give them full financial access which includes labor rates for all other employees.). The iPad assigns the tip to whoever pays out the ticket when the customer leaves. So if your host uses his or her pin to close the ticket and the customer adds a tip that ticket is then assigned to the host rather than the waiter or waitress that helped them on the front end of revel. Furthermore, the manager can't even see a server's tips to pay out the credit card tips accurately from iPad until he or she has batched out at the end of the day. The only solution after two years of trying to remedy this situation for CajunKitchenCafe.com is to pull the report from a laptap on the backend after the point of sale has been batched at the end of the day or put the credit card tips on the employees paycheck which is a huge change to culture for most restaurants that have been in business for as long as Cajun Kitchen.

One of my worst business decisions....

Opmerkingen: 1. Difficult to set up. I'm nearly set up now and it took me an average of 10 hours a day for 6 or 7 days.
2. Misrepresented themselves as being able to scale down for a small quick service bar with bar tabs.
3. Hold times for support are any where from 20 sec's-1 hour!! Unreliable.
4. Support staff are very nice and try hard to help, but there is some language barrier with every support staff member 24 hours a day.
After many phone calls, emails and frustrating nights I finally received confirmation today that they will release me from contract and charge me 45% restocking fee on equipment. IM somewhat satisfied by that. If you have a QSR or a FSR maybe they work....And maybe usually they answer support calls faster. I don't know. I'm just glad I'm out with a minimally painful 1k mistake.

Pluspunten:

Very adaptive if you are FSR. Many ways to get to open tabs. Support team emails articles and/or videos to help after virtually every support call . Support staff are very friendly and patient.

Minpunten:

SOUNDED good, but they couldn't deliver! Make sure they demonstrate the feature you want to use before purchasing. I spoke to my sales rep for 30-45 minutes and multiple times and still the system did not work as expected! I could not remove the majority of dining options (we are a bar with NO food or table service) I need lots of tabs and good inventory tracking of my liquor, kinda like a night club. The system works for FULL service, QUICK service or retail I guess... Definitely not a bar with no table service. It is VERY difficult to set up!! At first I thought lots of settings = lots of customization. In my case I found it not customizable to my needs. I was calling support 15 times a day for advise and work arounds. In 1 week I waited on hold with support 4 times for 20-25 minutes each call. One time I actually waited for 1 whole HOUR! Thank fully I still had not gone live. I don't like the menu lay out. Personally I think the categories and subcategories take up a LOT of valuable screen space (BIG squares). I thought I could bypass the subcategories, but after purchase found out that I couldn't get necessary reports that way. Modifiers can only add ingredients. I needed cocktails that use less of one ingredient and more of another. Later found out that was not possible. Also 3 year contract?! Wow that's a big commitment!

We use Revel for our restaurant for the last 2 years and it's challenging

Opmerkingen: It's easy to use, at least the front part and it's popular among employees a lot of locations used Revel and when we have new employee it's not rock in science to learn it, that if he/she doesn't' already knows it from a previous job.

Pluspunten:

It's pretty easy to use at lease the front end, the back end can be more user friendly, I'm able to update things really fast (menu items) even on our website menu, once I do it in Revel. It's running smoothly, never had a hardware problem with it and the communication between back end and from end is just a click away.

Minpunten:

It's pretty expensive, comparing with other softwares, customers service support is not that fast or knowledgeable (at least with the things I needed), for example I've called customers support 5 days ago, then I've submitted an email on the 8th and today is 14th and I haven't hear from you guys. The Inventory and Recipe books were so hard to use and really time consuming (example: if I buy one item in Grams and I want to put it in the recipe in once I have to make the transformation). The price of the items is not updating according to the last purchasing price (if you're entering Invoices in Revel) also it's not giving me the option to run a report and see the price fluctuation for one Purchased Item, or by Invoices by Items or orders by categories (is not helping me at all regarding the information I need for Inventory). In order to integrate with some systems I had to pay and don't think that's normal.

Expensive, expensive, expensive

Opmerkingen: After using this system for a little over a year, I would recommend anyone shopping for POS services look for a solution that has dedicated hardware. An iPad may be great for personal use, but a solution with actual dedicated hardware would have eliminated a lot of headaches for us. The iPad's themselves have numerous features that we don't really need to operate our POS, so it's kind of a waste.

Pluspunten:

The user face is extremely sleek. Appearance wise it's a total 10. It was also very easy for our servers to learn how to use.

Minpunten:

The cost is ridiculously high. Revel also likes to make changes that incur higher fees with the various vendors needed to process credit cards. A few months ago our payment gateway monthly fee raised high with absolutely no notice or real explanation as to why. When we called to ask about what changes were actually made, the reps could only seem to say that some security features had been upgraded. Really felt like we were just being gouged for more money. The set up process was daunting as well. We have since had numerous issues that were only resolved when I posted a negative review on another forum. So customer service isn't equitable to the monthly cost of the service. Syncing issues have also been a huge headache for us. The check splitting functionality has lost us money numerous times and caused terrible delays in our server's ability to help guests. Checks will merge themselves back together after a payment has been processed and its usually almost impossible to correct once it happens.

An expensive

Opmerkingen: The Revel system is not for all businesses. The sales reps will tell you that the Revel system is capable of everything that all other POS systems will do. However to accomplish the same functions as others it is not as easy as they make it seem. We have considered switching to an alternate POS system because the complicated structure of the Revel system takes quite a bit of work to manage.

Pluspunten:

The employee management features are good. It easy to create employee schedules and track employee profits and sales.

Minpunten:

We switched to Revel from QuickBooks POS because we wanted to move to a cloud based POS. Our goal was to be able to manage our retail store and build an e-commerce business. We were told that the Revel system was capable of everything that QuickBooks POS did and much more. However, once we began building it out we quickly realized it was not capable of doing what the sales rep told us it would nor did it have many of the features we used in QB. It took us nearly six months to completely rebuild our entire inventory system, because Revel did not support selling a single product by multiple units of measure (ex. soda by the can, case or 6 pack). Now that we finally have the system in place we've had problems with the inventory management system giving us false quantities resulting in over purchasing and/or running out of key products. They also release new system updates and products every couple of months, however the new releases often have problems and many of the tech support personnel have no idea how to fix problems.

A Nightmare...probably a good product but will take you almost a year to learn it.

Opmerkingen: Once we were able to talk to tier two people, things improved.

Pluspunten:

Lots of good reports ... if you finally figure out how to get to them. Till is good. Lots of info in "University" must read it two or three times before it makes sense.

Minpunten:

Labor intensive, requires many many steps to accomplish one thing. Has left our accounting in shambles Unforgivable i.e If you make a mistake in entering purchase order, you can't fix it . It just stays there forever "Integrate with QB' ... does not fully integrate...i.e does not integrate line for line First Tier support only repeats what you tell them is the problem, no fixes Took two weeks to get the wiring set up right d/t false directions from support Has "Chat" but nobody chats... just refers you to something else

Innovative QSR POS solution, terrible customer service and poor reliability

Opmerkingen: Although it’s an innovative product, the quality of customer service is horrible. Three of our restaurants in Europe run on Revel and we have seen significant decrease in stability / consistency. Frequent updates in recent months have caused complete service failure during lunch time (as updates seem to come in at exactly that time). Our account manager is basically helpless, and can only offer us to pay hefty fees to their consultants as well as VIP services in order for us to get support. Far behind NetPos which we use in our other outlets! We halted now the implementation of Revel across our 5 restaurants concepts with 70 outlets and are looking to switch to another provider. Further we tried to implement our mobile app with Revel’s API, turned out it is basically unusable at this stage due to limitation of calls we can make to it.

Pluspunten:

-Innovative cloud based solution -Low Capex vs. other full fledged POS solutions -Hardware can be purchased separate

Minpunten:

-Poor reliability, frequent updates / changes to the system make it difficult to maintain. Updates which are not announced cause a lot of disruptions in restaurant -Poor customer service -API is poorly documented, limited calls allowed

Best and more robust system in the market

Pluspunten:

The best thing about this System is the easy and intuitive interface. It greatly facilitates the operations of the day and allows us to always work in a better way. It has, also, a number of options and improvements that allow me to adapt to my needs, especially the part of the discounts. They are the best!

Minpunten:

The bad thing is the implementation, being such a complete software it takes a long time to configure all the functions to your liking to work in a better way. However, with practice and patience, it is possible to get ahead.

Shopped around and finally found the best

Opmerkingen: As a franchise operation with 16 locations that have run 3 previous point-of-sale systems, I can confidently say Revel is the best. It isn't simply that their system is easy to learn, or that they have almost every capability that you can think of, but it's the fact that they keep making it better. Their software continues to change and evolve to fit my stores' needs. I've submitted several feature requests that have already been released in updates. When a franchisee has an issue, I can get a knowledgeable tech support agent on the line in minutes that can help resolve it quickly. We looked high and low for an enterprise solution that fit our model and I'm positive we made the right choice with Revel.

Pluspunten:

Easy to use front end with a robust, feature-packed browser-based back end that makes multi-unit support effortless.

Minpunten:

It is a bit pricey compared to some other systems, but the quality and support you get is worth it in every way.

Not at all good

Opmerkingen: THIS SYSTEM DOES NOT WORK

Pluspunten:

Equipment looks nice and this is about all I can say about Revel. They do answer the phone when you call not that they are of any help.

Minpunten:

This system will stop working right when your trying to make a sale. We have lost several sales because of this. When you call Revel they blame it on TSYS and Freedom pay and tell you they don’t know what is wrong. But they will work on it and it could take 3-5 days to fix. Maybe they can fix it “Maybe “. Don’t waste thousands on this System. Combat Defense Systems Fayetteville NC

Essential Foods Review of Revel

Opmerkingen: Many things need impprovment but overall a good system. Things to improve on... Inventory, Need a sperate app on Ipad to help take Phisicall inventory. Back side functuanilty needs improvement, too many steps to add products make availble that when you add a product you can do everyting in one step instead of saving and ving to next step and again and again! more tutorials on bulding recipies and buding inventory on restaurant side. Scheduling, Being able to have set shift blocks would help in the scheduling. Better personalized service. our local installer who is supposed to be our problem solver (David Bovenkamp) is not at all helpfull and very hard to get in touch with. Need support that is easily reached and can trouble shoot us quickly. MORE TRANING ON INSTALL!!!!! we have struggled learning ourselves how to build products and menus.! If all functuallity worked smoothly It would be completly worth the value. as of right now the smothness of everything makes it not worth the value

Pluspunten:

Front End very user firendly

Minpunten:

Backend lacking and functunallity needs imporvment

Regretted it right off the bat

Opmerkingen: Stay away! This is not a system for beginners. There are a lot better systems out there, keep looking. We are switching to Cake but also considered Square.

Pluspunten:

Offline mode... that's it. Its requiring me to say more but there really isn't anything else good to say and I've been a customer for 3 years.

Minpunten:

Customer service is terrible. Hours on the phone trying to fix hardware issues. The back end is extremely confusing and difficult to program and navigate. They are unwilling to help with this part so it's all on you. I'm too busy running a restaurant to be a computer programmer. And don't buy the app...it doesn't work at all.

Average system with disastrous relationship management staff

Pluspunten:

I liked the idea that it worked in iPad with KDS, reporting and QSR menu building options. I though it was good until I tried the alternatives.

Minpunten:

Poor and complicated customers database Too many dropped connections between POS and KDS Poor inventory management Complicated app update process After using the system for 5 years I decided to cancel my subscription, they lock my account and didn't respond on time and asked me to pay an additional month ( because of their late reply) to get access to export my old reports, so be cautioned if you are using it now or planning to use it.