TouchBistro

This is one of the most arrogant company's I've ever encountered. All along they've been treating me like they're doing me a favor and I'm bloody fortunate to pay them every month for a service that has now cost me in the thousands over the purchased hardware and rented software thousands.

Soon as possible, I'm off to another provider -- one that actually answers the phone before I have to shave again.

After researching the market for new POS system for my newly established Cafe/Bar I found Touch Bistro to be superior to many products in the market. It is cost effective, easy to use, doesn't require specialized equipment (Only Ipad, printer and cash till), easy to install and learn on your own and requires minimum training for new staff. One of the most important feature that many other POS don't provide is the dashboard and cloud reporting. I rely heavily on these data to manage my business effectively and efficiently. It provides a breakdown of sales performance over any period of time, connects to my accounting system and load sales data directly into my accounting system, has excellent integration with 3rd party apps such as 7Shifts for scheduling and Shogo for accounting. I'm truly impressed with this product and it's robustness. I have recommended the product to many other business owners and I always get the same reaction of amazement when they see the reporting it provides compared to the POS systems they currently use.

First off: TouchBistro seems to be the best option out there for a full-service restaurant POS. We looked at everything we could find (that's available in Europe) and trialed the three leaders, and TouchBistro came out on top. We moved from an outdated local POS and have generally been happy. It works as expected, it hasn't had any catastrophic failures, and represents OK value for money.

That said, there are some problems, both with the software and with the sales/support:

- Frequent crashes when printing tickets (more than once per day). You have to restart TouchBistro, find your now-closed table, and reprint the ticket.
- No way to print invoices. This is required in most European countries and TouchBistro offers no way to do this. It causes us a big delay to have to generate one in Word and print it out for the customer. If they are going to sell in Europe they need to have this core function that other, more basic, systems offer.
- No way to print and charge part of a table. Missing is the ability to select various items, regardless of which seat they are at, and let me print a ticket and charge for those items. We literally lose 30 minutes a day moving items between seats for large groups when they want to pay.
- No menu support for multiple locations. Even though they have a page on their web site dedicated to franchises and multiple locations, the capabilities aren't there. Menus have to be painstakingly typed in by hand on the iPad (no cloud/web support) and while you can eventually move a menu from one location to another, it is a convoluted procedure involving a call to tech support. This was one of the selling points that attracted us to TB and they haven't delivered.
- No reporting support for multiple locations. You have to log in, view one report, then log out and log back in with a different username to see the other report.
- The localization (Spanish at least) is horrible. It's like Peggy Hill did it. They seem to have just run all the strings through Google translate and much of it is nonsensical.
- Impossible to update menu during service. If something runs out or a beer tap changes, you have to wait for everyone to log out.

We are going to stick with TB for now, but there is room for improvement.

Touchbistro is an easy right out-of-the-box solution for all sorts of styles of restaurant service. It's fairly quick to set-up and support is excellent.

You can easily throw new staff to it and have them come out on top feeling like they understand how to use it very quickly. Intuitive as an iPad/iPhone program should be to new users.

Reporting is very good unless you're expecting TouchBistro to do a lot of the heavy lifting - it's good, but not quite amazing on the back end quite yet.

Be aware of how you organize your products early on for the reporting that you do get. It's only as good as the input and thought you put into it while your business is just a baby - that can come back to nip you once you have a better feel for both the software and your establishment.