Square POS vs. TouchBistro

Square was absolutely fantastic when I first started using it. Easy to set up, use, changing settings, and the like. It has evolved over the years, almost too much, to an insane amount of options, apps, settings, et cetera. I would like to see options for just utilizing specific parts, such as invoices, versus the entire system being set up for daily sales. It makes the tracking side of things a little wonky when you only send 2-5 invoices/month for larger projects. Overall, I like that it’s familiar to me, which is why I continue to use it

Incentivized

For a small business like ours, it works very well, is very user friendly, but the cost to add more tablets so that we can keep one at the bar, one on the interior dining area and one on the outside dining area is difficult as they have to be iPads, and there is an additional cost to add another tablet for use on the floor

Incentivized

• After you set a daily processing deadline time, charges processed by that time are deposited the next business day.
• The reporting dash board looks overwhelming but that's because it has all of the the information that you've processed before. That was invaluable when we recently went to look at the detail on a two year old transaction and were able to find the information by ourselves.
• The ability to use multiple devices is great. We can process charges on a computer, a tablet, or even a smartphone.
• Receipts are automatically sent to the customer's preferred email or texted to their phone.

Incentivized

• Very fast transaction times; I do not need to wait for the credit slip printer to respond, it is almost instantaneous.
• I can add, delete, or modify menu items on the fly and in real time in literally a handful of seconds.
• TouchBistro provides an intuitive and easy way to check my tasting room’s metrics in real time from anywhere on the globe.
• My employees are able to access a customized menu of item modifiers and discounts very quickly and easily.

Incentivized

• The cost of the hardware (specific scanners and receipt printers) was prohibitive for my company, and whilst we managed without them, they would have been nice to have. The range of scanners and printers that integrate with Square is small, so despite our devices' capabilities to read barcodes (we used ipads) and the Zebra receipt/label printers we had, we couldn't use either as the system wouldn't integrate with them.
• Whilst Square's credit card reader is nifty in design, it's a bit small and lacking substance to have as a customer-facing reader so it really needs the dock the company offers. The dock is awkward to open to reset or pair the reader. We often found pairing the reader with the device running the system tricky and confusing, relying on pressing one button and then interpreting a sequence of lights that often caused confusion. The pairing process might have been clearer presented through the device rather than the reader.
• Truly can't think of any more!

Incentivized

• Online ordering can not be added on to once the customer arrives, can’t edit or change anything once placed
• Slow speed to place next order, and syncing with debit machines
• Frustrating that screen needs to be closed until payment goes through, hard in a very busy restaurant
• New updates always cause glitches in the system. The last update I now have drinks printing to my kitchen that never did before.
• Admin and servers not being able to do printouts
• Discounts not displaying on day printouts

Incentivized

I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.

Incentivized

We find Square POS is very user friendly. Its interface is customizable to our needs and very easy to use. Before we adopted Square POS, we used a combination of solutions from different manufacturer to try and achieve a portion of the functionality that Square POS provides under only 1 login

Incentivized

It's an incredibly easy system to navigate both from a management perspective as well as a service member perspective.Training, programming items and inventory, day to day sales, processing payments, gathering reports and data, gift card sales and processing (with the exception of online for us) is easy and seamless.

Square POS support is good, I would not say they are great. There is a good knowledge base that you can access and there are other service providers who support Square POS who can assist you, but I find that the lack of help and support for setting it up for different industries is a let down. We had to research for hours just to find a solution to fix our need for a billing option for services for example. It would be great if Square POS broadened its support and solutions for various industries.

Incentivized

First of all, I hardly ever need support for Touch Bistro, that’s how well it works. In the very instances over the years where I did need to call, customer support was easily accessible and fast and accurate with their responses

Incentivized

Square POS is just the easiest to use and therefore the easiest to onboard new users to. I'd also like to point out, that if you're missing or lost one of the readers it's so easy to buy one at an Apple store or even other merchants like T-mobile or Verizon. WePay had less fees but was harder to onboard new users to. Eventbrite had really high fees.

Incentivized

Toast overall was a very impressive system. However being new to Canada I was hesitant to sign. Clover worked well with payment processing but was not a great system for sales and service. Square would repeatedly crash and miss payments, their customer service was terrible and took too much effort to have any corrective assistance. We went with TouchBistro because in all the restaurants I have worked in this has been a consistent system and was able to integrate with Moneris payments.

• The transaction fees and charge rates are much higher than other options available. We only used this system for a short time while we were switching to a MUCH cheaper option (Authorize.net).
• I have also used this system with a charity that I volunteer with who only uses it during a couple of fundraisers a year when they have a small gift shop set up to sell donated goods to raise money. For such low volume, the fees aren't as big of a deal and the convenience of being able to take cards no matter where the event is located makes it worth it.
• This is a system your average consumer will recognize and trust, so there's that.

Incentivized

• The consistency of ordering with Touch Bistro has aged me money! From the customer to the person who takes the order to the person who makes the order and then back to the customer we have less room for error with Touch Bistro.
• It can be slow during large volume times, especially if a lot of my customers are laying with credit cards or gift cards.

Incentivized