Victoria Burden, owner of American diners V-Ate and Witham and Blues, explains how using the Clover POS system has revolutionised the way her businesses are run.

We’ve had our EPOS system in for almost two years, starting with it in Witham and Blues then introducing it to V-Ate.

One thing we struggled with on the old POS system was having to go to the customer, take the order, and either having to enter that in at the till or go to the kitchen.

Having the hand-held devices means that we can be at the table while taking an order – it’s a talking point, you know. I’ve seen other ones on the market, but because this one looked a little bit iPad-y, they interest the customers more.

I’m a bit of a chatterbox, especially when it comes to customers – with this system I can just press ‘fire’ and the order might even come out while I’m still at the table. Customers go, ‘How has that happened? It’s like magic!’

The system is broken down by apps including register, tables, inventory and reporting. You can restrict who sees what, so younger front of house staff can only see what they need, for example.

It just changes how your business and customer service work.

What we wanted from our POS system

One of the main things we were looking for is something that is easy for staff to get the hang of. We’ve got nearly 14 staff here and in this industry you normally have a high turnover, including a lot of school leavers and students back from university or going off to university.

We can’t have staff doing anything naughty with it, either. For example, you can only put a card payment through once. It’s constantly checking on you – even if someone pays for one lot and then pays for something else afterwards the machine will ask if it’s a duplicate payment.

Record-keeping was an important factor for us too. On this system we can find whoever took the last order and I can go into the app and see how things are going.

I’ve been in America on holiday before and I can look back at takings to see if the restaurants have had a good night. I can ask for the story behind the refund if I see one. You’ve got a little window on your business, whether you’re there or not.

If the customer doesn’t have the receipt, you can ask for the last four digits of their payment card and find an order to refund or discount an item.

Our accountants can look into it as well. They can just login and find what they need which saves us having to send paperwork and look into it ourselves.

It’s opened us up to doing more than we thought we could with a POS system.

“It just changes how your business and customer service works”

Dealing with problems

The only limitation with the POS is how good your internet supply is. If you’re really out in the sticks somewhere then it won’t work so well, but that would be the limitation with any POS system.

Clover are so good. They’ll ring us and tell us there’s a problem with one of our terminals before we even know about it. It’s such a reliable system that doesn’t cause us any problems.

We pay less than £90 a month at each restaurant for the system. It’s very cheap for what you get.

Cambridge Event Bars provides bar solutions for festivals, corporate and large events. Owner Nick Gowler tells us how using refurbished POS models from Lolly meets the needs of his business.

We half-introduced our POS system to Cambridge Event Bars two years ago, bringing in four systems to replace our then- POS – these are much better. Before, we were using a standard cash bills system.

Key considerations

I looked at the transportability of POS systems as well as checking if they would lose power. I wanted to know whether they would carry on working at places like festivals where the power goes in and out.

Accountability of cash failings was also important – if there are cash errors I want it to be easier to find them, looking back in the history to see what went wrong.

It’s a very fast system, easy to use and quick to understand on the programming side of things. It has sped up our turnover times immensely.

Going second-hand

When we were originally searching, we were looking for iPad-based systems – but we couldn’t really find anything that worked for us and in doing that we came across the MyPos system. It’s kind of what we were looking for – a very simple interface that lets you take as much or as little away from it as you wanted.

We went for the second-hand unit as a lot of our tills get broken on an annual basis. For us to have a new till system and to see one of our staff drop it or for it to get chucked in the back of a van would be awful.

The refurb units haven’t been through a lot – they might’ve just been sitting in a coffee shop for a while.

They [the units] came from Lolly – they contacted us initially about having this new till system. We couldn’t quite justify the amount of money per till based on how we were using it at the time. Then we asked them if they had any refurbed units coming through and they had just started bringing them in – that worked perfectly for us. A refurb is around £300 cheaper than brand new.

The staff took to it very quickly and it was very simple to use.

It basically tells you what to do and it can encourage staff to ask about things like double measures, mixers, age verification – you can program all of these questions in.