A till system costs you money when a sale takes more taps than it needs, when a person moves its numbers into another system by hand, and when its settings haven't been looked at since installation week. None of these shows up as a line on an invoice, which is why they survive for years. Here's how to spot each one in your own venue this week.
Is the till slow where it matters?
Stand at your busiest till on your busiest night and count taps on the top ten orders. A vendor once told me their till only added a few seconds per sale. At peak, a server has about eighteen seconds a drink including pouring it. Add thirty seconds of till and your hundred-drink half hour becomes sixty. That's not an annoyance, it's your capacity, and you paid for it twice: once in the subscription and once in the drinks that never got rung in.
Does anyone re-key numbers out of it?
Follow the morning routine. If somebody opens the till's report and types figures into a spreadsheet, an accounts package or a booking sheet, you're paying a person to be a cable. At one site it's half an hour a day. Across a group it quietly becomes somebody's whole job, forever, doing work a connection would do for nothing.
When were the defaults last touched?
Tip prompts, service charge, minimum spends, prompt screens: they went in on day one, set by whoever was standing nearest, and most operators never go back. I rebuilt one venue's tip prompt, testing where it appeared, the wording and what the server said out loud, and monthly card tips went from a couple of hundred pounds to two and a half thousand. Nothing about the service changed. Only the defaults did.
Do you trust its reports?
Ask your bookkeeper how long the VAT return takes. Hours means your systems reconcile. Days means people are stitching numbers from three places. If the answer is "I don't want to think about it", the till is only telling part of the story and someone is paying for the rest in evenings.
Who this is for
- Operators who suspect the till is slowing service but have never timed it
- Owners whose morning admin has grown a mysterious spreadsheet stage
- Anyone paying for modules and integrations they've never switched on
- Multi-site groups that can't compare venues without a day of copy and paste
What it costs to fix and what to expect
Most of the fixes here are cheaper than the problem. Re-timing a sale flow and turning off unused prompts is an afternoon in the settings. Revisiting defaults typically pays for itself within weeks. Connecting the systems that currently pass through human hands is a defined project, usually days of work rather than months. If you want the fast version, the free Stack Check takes two minutes and tells you which of these is happening to you, and a free 30 minute call via the contact page sorts the rest.
Does this sound like something you need help with?
Book a free 30 minute call and tell me what's going on. If I can help, I'll say how. If I can't, I'll say that too.