Hey everyone! We've been using the traditional POS in our quick service cafe for 6+ years and are getting ready to transition to Square for Restaurants the first week of June.
I'm putting together a plan for setting up the menu, training our team, etc. and just wanted to reach out and see if anyone had any tips/tricks, best practices, or even horror stories, haha.
We'll be switching from Fresh KDS to Square KDS at the same time, so any thoughts/tips on that would be appreciated too!
Thanks in advance!
That's a great thought @Sam_400º! My tendency is to "rip off the bandaid" and go all in, but it might be wise to do things incrementally for the team.
Are you referring to the self-serve kiosk? I've seen you mention it before, but haven't actually looked into it. That's actually a very interesting idea...
Thank you so much for that article, @tranguyen!! I'm working on my set-up plan this week, and this is super helpful.
Hey I have horror stories out the wazoo for Square for Restaurants. My coffee shop only has one main POS device, no KDS, but I did try to set up Square Online at the same time of switching. We switched from Square POS to Square for Restaurants & Square Online 2-3 months ago and still to this day haven't been able to get all the kinks worked out. It's so incredibly frustrating. I'm glad we are just a small little shop and didn't have to go through all this with a full team of people. To spare a long rant I'll just highlight a couple of the lingering issues, first is the extra clicking through menus. I had to redo all our items to make use of all the new features and get it to where customers could use the menu online, but now our baristas in the shop to have more buttons & questions to click through so ringing someone up takes three times as long now. I could've made separate items for online & in shop but then that defeats the purpose of items recognizing low stock or out of stock. But even then the modifiers don't work the way that I need them to so I can't even get our drinks on the online menu. Our syrups are .50 once, not .50 each. If someone orders a chocolate peanut butter honey latte they'll get partial pumps of each flavor adding up to 3oz of syrup total, divided between the 3 different syrups, for only +.50. Another orders a vanilla latte, they get the same amount 3oz of syrup of only one flavor still for .50 I can't build it into the price of a latte because people order plain lattes. Flavors are available on different types of drinks so I'd rather not duplicate my entire menu just to have plain options. Also there's no way to track inventory on modifiers so if we run out of vanilla it still shows the option available, which will complicate seasonal drinks. Also also, as far as I can tell, tracking inventory is item specific, so if two items share the same component it tracks separately rather than together which could mean the customer could see us out of sparkling water but not Italian sodas even though we have no S Pellegrino for either item. Lastly since starting Square for Restaurants it no longer prompts the customer to redeem Loyalty rewards. All the support pages I find points to POS device settings but we don't have Loyalty as an option in our Settings menu. Settings is basically empty except for a couple generic general overhead account things. Oh Lastly Lastly, I'm still trying to figure out how to get my domain switched over from Squarespace to Square without destroying traffic that I've built up. It's all been a nightmare that I still haven't figured out yet and tomorrow starts the city's Summer festival on Main Street (right where we're located) that's expecting 4000+ people this weekend. I wish I didn't have the stress of all this Square stuff and that it just worked so I could focus my energy on the rest of the business that's starting to fall behind.
We use Square Pos with Fresh KDS, I tried to use Square KDS but it just wouldn't work for us. Square KDS just wasn't as flexible as Fresh and we had issues with Online Orders appearing on entry and not at scheduled times. This was a couple of years ago and this may have been fixed but its still lingers. It was quite frustrating for us as we run on a FIFO basis and having an order sitting on the screen for hours whilst waiting to fire.
We use square for restaurants, while we didnt switch from square POS, I sometimes revert to that interface in events through a necessity for simplicity.
Square POS is just another layer on top of the POS and everything works pretty similarly.
There is a concept of menus, which is over and above categories. This is literally a additional layout set of groups or tags on top of our categories. - This allows you to do logical layouts and and groupings that make sense from a menu perspective rahter than preparation and delivery
There is also a table layout approach with plus - these are pretty much implmenented as specifically names bills that map to tables.
There is production ticket routing so that production tickets get sent to the appropriate stations (this is category based).
Honestly, unless your offering is massive and there is need for complicted rules then I would do as you suggested and just 'rip off the bandaid'.
Bruce
