CAKE POS

Our customers love their screen. They like that they can see their order. It's easy to read and understand. We love that we can use the system from home on the laptop and not just in the shop. I make changes to the menu mostly from home. I love having the itemized close cash receipt every day. I love all the reports that I get for tracking my business.

I don't like that all the buttons are the same color. It makes it very difficult to find buttons in a hurry when you have 40 different syrup flavors and 34 different teas. We need colored buttons that we can use as groups, for example, I could make all our sugar free syrups green and all the syrups that start with an A, blue, etc... It helps your eyes to find things quicker. It is really stressful for new employees to find buttons when training and the customer is standing there staring at you. It's better as a trained employee, but it would save us time at the machine when we could be making their order. Colored buttons are highly needed. Also, ever since the last software update that affected us directly, it is harder for me to add new products to the menu and put them in the right place. I can't put my finger on what changed, but i have trouble adding new products under existing categories. They come out as new buttons on the main screen. Not sure how to fix that.

This system is user friendly and has all of the BASIC features you need to get going. The customer facing hardware is attractive and functional. Back end programming is fairly easy to use once you are familiar with it. Online ordering has been fairly easy to implement and has all of the BASIC functions you need.

After working with this system in multiple locations for a few years, we have come to learn of some shortcomings - reporting with the system in difficult to navigate and hard to generate more detailed sales reports. It is not an intuitive reporting system. The basic snapshot functions are great, but digging deeper to get more detailed reports is cumbersome. Also some basic functionality on the restaurant side is still missing. Tickets in the kitchen print up items in random order and there is no way to address this in the system. Most other systems have the basis functions to group and prioritize items on tickets for the kitchen and bar printers. You don't realize how important this is until you don't have it on a POS system. There is still no way to offer discounts or accept gift cards online either.

We switched to CAKE from another POS system in 2016, after being in operation for 1.5 years. We have been impressed with the way CAKE constantly tries to provide new features. As a farm-to-table quick-service restaurant, our menu changes weekly and we find it simple and straightforward to make updates each week. Due to COVID-19, we recently activated the online ordering and we believe it has saved our business. We were able to activate and integrate it quickly and we love the reporting capabilities the system gives us. Our customer service has been top notch--from our sysco rep to our CAKE customer support manager, we have received a quick response to any question we've had. We feel very comfortable requesting new features and integrations based on our needs and we feel like they really listen to us and try to incorporate our ideas quickly and simply. We did not have this level of customer support with our previous POS system and we really value being able to get a live person on the phone quickly and easily when we have an issue. We love the intuitive, easy-to-read sales analysis reports and use them each week with our management team to evaluate our menu items and determine our next round of specials. We really like that we can make menu edits both on the POS and with the online platform---hoping for a mobile app next for very quick and simple edits!

We first purchased in Spring 2016. The software felt a little sluggish and honestly, we were not sure if it would easily keep up with our pace. But we have been very impressed with CAKE's constant evaluation and roll-out of new features and integrations--they haven't missed a beat! We don't use all the features yet, but because of the recent success with our online activation, we are now considering two more apps. I would prefer a tiered/capped monthly pricing system depending on how many apps/additional software platforms we integrate (like accounting, customer management, 3rd party delivery apps, etc)--rather than installing each a-la carte, but hopefully that will be an option in the future. The additional monthly fee per app has made us hesitant to try new ones. We would also like to have more control over the look and feel of the online ordering page--functionally it meets our needs, but would love to integrate it into our own website and select the background color, text color, etc, to make it feel like a seamless integration rather than making our customers feel like they are "leaving" our site to go to another. There are some features/edits that are only available from the POS system (not menu items, but system preferences/settings categories) In the future, I hope they make those features editable from the online access platform as well, because sometimes I want the flexibility of making certain adjustments from home on my computer during off-hours.