Leaving Square For Toast

[seattlesam]

Finally throwing in the towel here.  I love the built in HR / payroll side of Square, but for actual restaurant functionality it is just too clunky.  It is clear to me that Square slapped the word 'Restaurant' on their Ecom product, starting selling it to restaurants, and are now retroactively trying to upgrade it into real restaurant software.  5 years from now it will probably be great.  But the problems right now are too acute: 

• order cut-off times are a mess:  I am constantly contacting customers who put in an order when we are closed who were not aware that we were closed.  A simple re-design of the initial pop-up screen where you select "Pick Up or Deliver" could solve this.  Toast, for example, forces you to actively select the option for "schedule for later" so that you cannot passively click through the alert about business hours.  
• adding new menu items:  there is too much friction to add menu items to both the in-store POS and the online ordering at the same time, because item syncing from Dashboard to Online does not sync the category.  This means you have to manually select the category for a new item to show up on your online website menu.  Every other restaurant POS I have seen does this automatically.   Not to mention, the option to choose the category is a long scroll down the Item page, passing by many other options that are useless for restaurants and clearly residual from Ecom (E.G "Nutrition Information", "SKU", and "Variations" are all given higher scroll priority then "Item Category", even though your new Item will be invisible online unless you select a Category)
• reporting:  it's just weak.  The line charts are almost useless visually.  Defaulting to showing item and category sales by hour is just plain wrong. The best bet is to export data to excel and make your own reporting Dashboard with it.  Doable, but Toast and Heartland's built in reports and charts are much more user-friendly and restaurant focused.  Also, you cannot run a report that separates your delivery from pick up sales, despite the fact that they are coded as different fulfillment types.  You also cannot run a labor hours report, only cost, despite the fact that the system is clearly tracking labor hours. This stuff is automatic in Toast and Heartland.  
• delivery tickets: contain an absurd amount of text on them, almost all of it useless.  Waste of paper and ink, but more importantly, confusing and difficult for line cooks and expos to read in the middle of service.  They emphasize the estimated time of delivery, instead of the driver pick-up time (which is buried in a paragraph of text).  The time of delivery is irrelevant to the cooks and expos, and to organize that way would mean arranging the delivery tickets completely out of order with the pick-up tickets.  
• happy hour: essentially there is no solution for this.  You can run an in-store discount for an entire day, but you cannot specify the timing. Online (a huge percentage of total volume during pandemic), all you can do is offer 'Coupons'.  Again, if that doesn't scream "This is Ecom store software being jerry-rigged for restaurants" I don't know what does.  
• support: there is almost no restaurant-specific support.  If there is a problem with online ordering, you better hope it happens before 5pm because the 24hr support line will tell you that the website support team is done for the day.  Their proposed solution for order cut-off time issues (put time parameters on each menu category) crashed my entire Weebly website.  Seller community is useful but the general response from MODs is "thanks for the feedback, we will add this to our feature request board".  From there, your problem disappears into the ether unless another seller can chime in and help you. There is no way to follow up with feature requests.  

There is more, but that's what comes to mind at the moment.  Good luck to all.   

[ryanwanner · Accepted solution]

Hello @seattlesam !

Wow, that's quite a list you have here! I'm not here to beg you to stay with Square--your business needs the solutions that work for your business--but I'd like to talk about a few of these issues and see if there's something that can be done to make things easier for you while you're still here.

Order cut-off times. Yes, I agree that the screens the customers see could use a little polish. However, on my site (especially on a desktop) has pickup times listed in bold at the top of the screen, on a popup when they first hit the site, on the shopping cart list, and at the checkout state. Yes, people don't read anymore and expect it to be our problem not theirs, but short of an active "Choose your time" date/time selector I'm honestly not sure how else it could be fixed.

Adding New Menu Items. Since Weebly was its own thing originally and absorbed into Square, there are definitely some disconnects. Should menu items be on the list of disconnects? Probably not. I have a very hard time believing this isn't something that's actively being fixed on the back end. For now, I strongly encourage downloading the Weebly app to your phone. My steps for item creation:

Square-> New Item -> all the settings -> Save.

Wait a minute or two for the sync.

Weebly App -> Store -> Items -> the new item. Set category, set visibility. It saves your changes automatically.

It's taken my new item onboarding down to less than five minutes.

Reporting. I'm curious as to what level of granularity you're looking for with your reporting. I've been in the restaurant biz 30 years now, and I've been able to find everything that I need with either the stock reports or by building a custom report. Product Mix numbers? I have a custom report that only shows me item counts for the day. More detailed labor? Labor vs Sales custom report. With the time picker, I can get even more specific if I want. Please don't take this the wrong way, because I am genuinely curious: what else would you like to see?

Delivery Tickets. Sorry Square, I have to side with @seattlesam on this one. I don't understand why the prepare by time is buried while the estimated delivery time is front and center.

Happy Hour and Discounts in general. Yes, the disconnect is obvious with discounting between the point of sale and online. However, with the POS, you can select times for automatic discounts. That's how I have my happy hour discounting set up.

As for the online store, I do agree that the couponing idea doesn't go far enough for the restaurant biz. Here's what I know about the Weebly acquisition. Square took over Weebly right before the pandemic hit. All the plans in place to slowly roll out new bells and whistles catered specifically to the restaurant industry went out the window and it turned into "get it out now so restaurants can stay alive." So yes, your assessment of the eCom slapped with a Restaurants label isn't too far off base. But considering how much Square pivoted to give us a way to actively sell online, I can give them a little bit of a break. (Seiously, if we had to use the legacy online store through the pandemic I think all of us restaurants would have run screaming...) Are there issues? Of course. The majority are known to the dev team and are being worked on. I'm 90% certain coupon/discount integration is pretty high on the list.

Support. Square's phone in support is definitely... challenging. That's part of the reason the Seller Community exists. If you're running into random issues, posting it here usually means a pretty quick turnaround time on an answer. There are plenty of Super Sellers and Admins floating around here at any given time of the day to get on to problems pretty quickly.

So yes, I agree that Square is definitely not entirely geared towards restaurants the way that a Point of Sale that was built from the ground up to support restaurants would be. However, what Square has done for my restaurant over the 11 years I've been a merchant with them has made me work around any shortcomings I've encountered. To be frank, any POS solution is going to run into compatibility issues with your or any other individual business: every system is geared towards a basic use scenario. When you get into deep specifics for your business, the only way to really make a POS work for you is to have one built specifically for you.

Best of luck with your restaurant and whatever POS you land on! The only thing that really matters at the end of the day is to get what you need to run your business.

[seattlesam]

Hey Ryan, 

I appreciate the thoughtful responses here - a breath of fresh air to be sure.  I'll try to offer some quick responses back: 

Order Cut Off Times:  As I (and you) mentioned, what they could do is a forced click option that make people acknowledge that the order will be fulfilled on a different day / time.  Toast does exactly that, so they could just copy the Toast UI. This glitch of orders coming in after close causes problems for my restaurant almost daily, so "there's not much else we can do" isn't an acceptable conclusion for me.  

Adding New Items:  The workflow you described is more or less the same as mine.  Your belief that they are working to improve this may be right (I also said in a few years this product might be much better), but Square hasn't done anything to earn that type of loyalty from me.  If there is a clear-cut better product out there (Toast), then "hoping" Square has these things on their 'To-Do' or 'Feature Request' list isn't good enough. If the Feature Request list had a progress bar or something, I might be more confident (has this request been seen, is it actively being worked on? MobileBytes used to have this and it was awesome).  Also, I know enough about writing website code to know that moving around the order of the Item page so that 'Category' (a mandatory option) is at the top is not a complicated fix.  

Reporting: As I mentioned, that the item reports default to being displayed by hour makes no sense, and the accompanying line graphs are useless.  I also would like a labor hours report, not just labor cost.  Can I make custom reports for P-Mix by day? Yes. I can do this in Excel as well, with bar charts that makes them visually usable.  With Toast and Heartland, reports default to this, though you can fine-comb by hour if you want. I think if you were to see the quick reports that Toast and Heartland generate you would agree on this.  

Delivery Tickets: I know, right? 

Happy Hour: Actually I forgot you can choose the hours for in-house discounts, thanks for reminding me.  That part is totally fine then.  The rest, however, isn't.  Again, you seem to have a level of loyalty and faith in Square that I have never developed.  I do hope you are right, and these features are high priority.  But I have seen complaints about the happy hour situation on Seller Community dating pretty far back.  Again, with no meaningful insight into the status of feature requests, it feels a bit hopeless. 

So yes....:  Point taken, and agreed - no POS will be a perfect solution.  And while I have only been in the restaurant biz 10 years, and managing / owning for 5, I can say that compared to other systems I have used, especially Toast and Heartland (formerly Mobilebytes), Square is problematic (for me).  In the end, it's on me. I knew Square's restaurant product was new, and mostly geared towards cafes. I was surprised and disappointed by many of the issues laid out here.  I hope you are right, that in general they are grinding these issues and resolving them.  Thanks again for the thoughtful response! 

[kimapollo]

We are right behind you.  

[seattlesam]

Cheers 🍻