Toast POS

"Why I chose Toast"

Opmerkingen: With now being in business a full year now, I have and I still am learning pro and cons of doing business. I have worked in restaurants but I have never been on the manager/owner side and it's not as easy as you think it is. When running your own business for the most part you are on your own! I sat down with a computer tech to figure out the best POS system for my business. There are SO many out there and being unfamiliar with them a lot of research was done! I attended the Gordon Food Show a month before we opened and I got to see first hand how Toast worked. I was very impressed with the system and how easy it looked to operate (remember I've never been on this side of the business) and we had decided to work 100% with Gordon Food Service because of their support and looking at our best interest for starting our business. Now a year later, I could't imagine being with another POS system so no regrets here on choosing Toast for our POS!

Pluspunten: Customer Support! - I rate them 100 on this!! Any questions I have big or small, they are just a phone call away! If my call isn't answered right away or I get busy, they have the feature to leave your number and they will call you back ASAP.
Customer Service - Being a tech and answering some of the crazy questions (I'm one who probably has the most) they are always patient, friendly and very professional when answering questions.

Minpunten: Credit Card Processing Fees - With other Processing companies out there some are cheaper but overall with Toast, they win. It's the hidden fees you have to watch. Toast fees appear to be higher but what you see is what you get where with the other guys you have to read the fine print.

"Beware of their promises"

Opmerkingen: After 6 months, I am not impressed. I am spending so much more money than I was before, and put in so much effort and time into setting everything up, but nothing is ever on point with Toast.

Pluspunten: Nice features and ways to set up the menu for ease of use by employees. User-friendly up to a certain extent.

Minpunten: Most of the features promised by the sales rep were all available at an extra cost, after paying a lot of money already for the system and the hardware, you have to pay extra for EVERYTHING. Their customer support is very unreliable, sometimes you have someone great who knows exactly what you are talking about, sometimes it seems like the person has never even used the POS before... They put you on hold for 10+ minutes at a time too.

"Disappointing"

Opmerkingen: Below average. They've kept the software running at all times and that's a huge plus. However, they are charging top dollar and we were expecting a fantastic product. The product is only OK. The service has been spotty; at times good, at times not.

Pluspunten: The POS portion is solid. It's generally easy to use. It's been up about 99.9% of the time which is not true of all software. The people we have dealt with there have been nice and responsive.

Minpunten: The back end of the software is poorly designed and written. The inventory module is laughably bad; looks like it was designed and written by a college kid in a couple hours. The reporting is also not well thought out. More than once we've found the only option for a pretty standard report is to download data into Excel and manipulate it ourselves. There is no accounting application and no interface with Quickbooks. Generally it looks like a solid group designed the POS and then those people left or started working on other things. The service during the Covid 19 pandemic has been awful. It's nearly impossible to reach support and honestly makes me wonder if these guys are solvent. We had two management contacts that we would call in cases where we had support issues. Now both of those people have been (apparently) laid off. When we called support the last time, the recording warned that there were 33 people ahead of us in line. I've waited for an hour and eventually given up when there were only 12 ahead of me.

"Awesome product, completely cost effective and easy to work with. "

Pluspunten: I have found their system to be very easy to work with and definitely cost effective. The thing I hated about the other POS systems that are IPad based is that a new Ipad is so ridiculously expensive to replace. And I don't know about y'all, but when you hadn employees tech, you better be prepared to replace it. I have added tablets in literally less than 20 minutes on a Friday night because I decided that day I wanted a phone station. It was easy to do, and I took care of it without support. But when I have had issues on Friday night, like when Time Warner decided to go down for a couple hours just cause, Toast was right there on the phone and able to walk my staff through the offline experience. The data is easy to get on the back end, and in real time. I love being able to log in and see what is going on at any given time. Or edit the menu because I forgot something from my recliner at home, if I am actually able to that day. Y'all know how that is, or will.

Minpunten: Their software is a constant work in progress, which is a good thing. They have added a ton of features since June 2014 when I started with them. There isn't anything I don't like about the system. My only complaint is they don't yet have a fully integrated scheduling system. That is coming though, and there are solutions that sync with Toast, but I just haven't gotten away from our spreadsheet system yet. Old habits die hard.

"Careful with any 3rd party contractors that are used to help set up"

Opmerkingen: Toast sent over a 3rd party contractor to help install the system. Only for 2 hours plus 2 1/2 hours of drive time for them, and we had nothing that was in their scope of work to do. Although, they help is we paid them separately.
We get to the finish line and Toast sends over some shady shysters wanting to get paid by Toast and me.

Pluspunten: cloud base system with more functionality

Minpunten: Toast makes lots of assumptions on set-up. One, is that everyone is an IT major. Two, there is no help with hardware installation.