Revel Systems Reviews

We have now been live with our new Revel POS for a week. Naturally, there were a few issues during the switch over, but most of those were a) problems with my setup and b) easily corrected with help from the on-boarding team, tech support folks and very comprehensive online documentation. As of this writing, I believe we are finally “there.”

I am really liking Revel’s product. To be honest, I had no idea how much I was missing out on these past 4 years. I had just assumed that a mature and viable POS product did not exist in the iPad/Cloud arena. I assumed, incorrectly it would seem, that to get such a product I would have to one day shell out thousands or tens of thouands of dollars for one of the “big guys” with expensive hardware. I’m glad to have been proven incorrect in that assumption.

In my mind, one of the absolute best features of Revel is that it is so highly configurable. I have been able to create a POS that meets my business needs as well as the needs of my employees and guests. So far I have not had to “settle” for a configuration that works for “most” people. Instead I have found that I can tell Revel how I want it to work for me and it just works that way. I've never understood why most cloud-based POS companies think that they know more about running our businesses than those of us who are in the trenches. I have been delighted to realize that Revel is willing to put in the effort to create a POS that works they way we work. There is no one-size-fits-all, especially in restaurants. Revel's designers and engineers seem to understand that fact.

Little things like the following mean the world to me:

1) I can specify negative modifiers — ones that deduct from the price. Now my guests can truly have it their way and only pay for what they want. While I've always run my cafe that way, only Revel has allowed me to do that without a lot of unnecessary steps.
2) I can set up default modifiers, and more importantly when a guest doesn’t want that default it is easy to specify at the POS and it is obvious for the kitchen.
3) The flexibility of defining “one size fits all” modifier groups, and tailoring those to the needs of each product that uses them, has made my life so much easier. The modifier features are amazing, and I've just begun to scratch the surface of what is available.
4) And don’t even get me started on recipes. How I ever lived without those in my POS is a mystery. I guess I lived without them because I never knew I needed them!

In the past two days, my employees and I have been able to identify menu items whose gross margins are dragging us down. Since all of our products come with so many options, this has always been a hard, time-consuming thing to do, involving lots of spreadsheets and number crunching. Now that I have nearly all of my recipes defined, I’m able to run one Product Mix report whenever I want and identify problems before they become catastrophes. That alone makes the “extra” expense of the monthly Revel hosting fee worth it.

Even in a small shop, such as mine, inventory control is a nightmare. It has become very obvious to me that after a month or two this task will get much easier. Once I have finished tweaking my product and recipe definitions, I’m looking forward to “knowing” my inventory status with just the touch of a button. I know it won’t be completely accurate — no theoretical inventory system can possibly account for human error. But, I already can tell that it will be much more accurate than I’ve ever had before, and it will be more accurate without the drudgery of weekly physical inventories.

I would be remiss if I did not give a shout-out to your on-boarding and tech support people. They all proved to be very helpful, and very willing to let me go at my pace in this process. I am a tech geek from the days of Univac and IBM mainframes, punch cards and programming languages that are long dead and buried. Though I am now a chef I have never lost my love of all things tech. It was a pleasure to work with people who let me control the process as I was learning Revel. Their on-boarding team is willing to do as much, or as little, as their new clients need to get them up and running quickly.

If I had to sum up my early experiences with Revel and the switch over, that sentence would be ---- I now feel like I am more in control of my business, that I understand my business better.

As we enter our fifth year, a year that looks to be like it will be on schedule to be our first true profit year, that is huge. I'm looking forward to learning how Revel can help make that first profit year even more profitable.

Sure, there is always room for improvement. Revel, like most mPOS companies, needs to get their integrated EMV/contactless functionality up and running, not just for one or two payment processing companies, but for all of them. Having said that, I realize how expensive and how difficult that task is. But, if they get it done quickly and correctly, they will be a hard company to beat.

A few other reviewers mentioned one suggestion I will echo -- be prepared to spend some time learning what you have with Revel, and what it can do for you. Myself, I spent hours looking at every setting, reading the help bubbles for every setting, and making notes about what I did and did not want to implement. I asked a lot of questions. I watched a lot of videos. When I wasn't sure, I created tests, ran them and looked at the results.

Most importantly, I spent two days keying the same orders into both my current POS and Revel, looking for discrepancies and errors in my setup. Sure, that all took a lot of time. But taking a lot of time up front means spending less time fighting fires after going live.

What I'm trying to say is don't think you are going to get your hardware and go live in a week. I budgeted a month for training, setup and troubleshooting before I ever thought about going live. I think a month is the MINIMUM time needed in order to do it right, and I have set up a lot of POS systems in my career. Remember -- as restaurants, our POS is the hub of our data and data analysis. We wouldn't short-change our recipe development, or training our cooks and other staff. To succeed, we need great data that tells us everything we need to know about our business. Revel can be that vital hub, but only if we take the necessary time and effort in the beginning.

And, with that, I'll step down from my soapbox.

Despite the technical issues, our experience with Revel has been great due to its user-friendliness and extensive functionality.

I'd stay away from this system and this company. I'm a small business owner and I've spent more time trying to get Revel to fix their POS (point of sale) than I have running my own business. I will soon cut my losses and find an alternative solution. I promise, this company will drive you to extreme frustration. Finally, I recommend paying a little extra for a better Poiny of Sale system, you will find it's cheaper in the long run than trying to use Revel.

I have a hodgepodge of software doing different things and using different printers...Revel Up has integrated all my systems into one system and one set of printers

A POS system that is reliable most of the time.

Terrible experience with all teams involved.
The person that was supposed to be handling our case was rude and extremely inattentive
We didn’t even get to start using the system because it was not delivering what we asked for.

When it works it's great. Waaayyyyy too much down-time and too much difficulty getting back up. Not very reliable.

it has been a good first 7 years until we had to change to Adyen and installed online ordering, qr ordering

Great experience from start to finish.

n/a

Sorely disappointed in this millenial run company. No sense of understanding of customer loyalty. When I showed up in person at their offices in San Francisco, it was lunch time and the elevators were a turnstile of delivery people bringing in "take out" food to the office. I was treated very poorly when met by the Director of Sales who tried to just pawn off my issue "until Monday". Here were are suffering from a massive company wide fiasco costing us many man hours and challenges serving our customers when these guys are just sitting around enjoying their venture capital take outs for lunch. Kinda hard to take when you're working your ass off 3 states away with no breaks and no one will even respond/acknowledge the massive mistake made by their company. We were finally told today that they do not even have a customer service/care department...only a customer retention department that they self described as the department for customers considering leaving. YES, we said...that's who we need to talk to (still at 5pm...no contact for this mysterious department provided). Creating an exit plan...Such a bummer. Had such high hopes for this product. Too bad the people behind the scenes totally stink.

Overall Revel is a total letdown and will be replaced by year end with a better system, lots of things we were promised could be done require using their "Open API" which costs more per month than the entire POS system does for 5 stations. We were not told about the API pricing upfront (or that there was even a cost at all, it was pitched like it was included in the regular fee) just that we could use the API to do everything we told them we needed to do, my project manager informed me of the API pricing during our implementation, when I called out the sales rep for never mentioning the additional cost despite repeated conversations about how critical this was she told me "its not my job to tell you the pricing for the API since that's not my department"

It is also very difficult to impossible to find and load an order in the dashboard by customer. You have to load the customers orders report, find the customer in the list, click show orders, note the order number, then go to the order history report and then you can click through to the order, why isn't the order number under customers order a hyperlink to take me to the order?

They made a systems change to batch process updates to the POS instead of in realtime, we have a custom app that we use for check ins when a customer comes into the store and it adds customers to the revel system so we can link them to a sale and track close rate etc. They used to sync in real time from the dashboard to the stations, after a recent update it takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes for the customers to pull down from the revel dashboard. I have verified they show up on the dashboard instantly as they should, there is just a major delay in syncing back to the iPads now that was not there before the update.

Reporting is very weak in certain areas, you can't view profit by anything other than employee which is worthless if you don't have pay rates loaded which we don't since we aren't using that aspect of the system.

When we receive inventory in the store, we upload it into the revel dashboard via their excel template this works about 75% of the time, the rest of the time it just silently fails, you will never receive any notice that it failed, where it failed etc. So now before I do any uploads, I do an export of what we have immediately before so when it fails I can compare to the inventory after the partial upload to figure out where the import stopped so I can import the rest.

I could keep going but bottom line is if your needs are more than barebones or you are not a restaurant you should look elsewhere for a much better solution.

Long and short, our experience with the Revel systems POS (our intent is to use it in Retail application) has been a nightmare. The problems started early on in being sold hardware components that were not designed to work in the way we needed to utilize them - despite us being very detailed in what we needed - and despite the Sales reps assurances they would (specifically the barcode scanners and printers). We purchased our system in Mid-March but due to delays in the build-out of our store front and arrival of inventory components we were not actually able to begin the on-boarding/product and inventory load until Mid-May and that's when things turned awful.

Our initial product information load seemed to go well, however when we attempted to load the corresponding inventory via the method instructed it would not load. Come to find out we were given incorrect instructions and fields/information that should have been on the load sheet were not there. That issue began 5/15 and was finally resolved 5/17. On 5/16 another set of issues started during the attempt at setting up our receipt with logo, company info, etc (figured we'd do that while the inventory thing got figured out. Wrong!) That was finally figured out and resolved by our onboard rep on 5/17 at the end of the day... with zero explanation as to what the issue was and if it could happen again. Since we were finally able to go ahead and get the first phase of products/inventory info loaded (our onboard rep did it for us because no matter what or how we tried it was unsuccessful) we scheduled our POS front end training on 5/19 - which also was a bust because we learned that none of our printers were correctly configured before our system was sent. This also stalled us from being able to barcode the items in the store until 5/26 when that issue was finally resolved with one of our barcode printers and the receipt printer (it is now 6/15 and the second printer for our warehouse still hasn't been configured... we have literally been dealing with daily issues with the backend system and front end system all this time and haven't even been able to address that yet).

Other issues that occurred (that are now resolved but no one can explain the how or why it happened, or will it happen again?) where the backend system spontaneously dumped my login information on 6/7. Our rep basically had to reset me up (2 more days down). Thought we were finally good... got to the actual POS and discovered that the login PINs for myself and 3 of our employees did not work (despite the 3 employees info being present and correct in the backend - my information erased again and defaulted to a generic 1234). Got that sorted a couple days later.

This weeks issue has been with the integration to Quick Books online. The POS is sending inaccurate info to QBO - and of course, no one can tell us why, or worse, how to correct it. One generally assumes that in business accurate financial reporting is kind of a thing... I mean Revel hasn't had a problem charging us the monthly fee all this time and I'm sure they track that somewhere, right?

Naturally in the month from 5/15 to today, 6/15, we finally hit our limit and requested information on returning the system (being willing to take the risk of being without a POS system at our opening and just processing manually through QBO). Our onboard rep passed us on to Client Relations and a few days later we finally get a generic, and frankly offensive, email from customer rep that in no way acknowledged our issues and frustrations - but instead had a copy of our Revel contact attached. I assume the point was to put it out there that Revel only has a 30 day return policy (keep in mind rep didn't say that in his email... he pretty much implied "figure it out for yourself"). Of course, since we bought our system in March we are well beyond the 30 day limit.

I really could keep going. I am just shy of now 100 emails back and forth about issue, after issue, after issue - none of which truly got any clear resolution or explanation.

I'll save you some time. Do not buy this system. Its bad, the customer support is worse, and like us some of you will likely end up tossing a system in the storage room and going to another platform.

I think it's overpriced and too time-consuming inputting modifiers and making changes to suit our business needs

A Huge Mistake w/ Painful Ripple Effects. I want to convey concise specifics regarding where the decision to purchase the REVEL system went wrong without emotion but this process from start to finish coupled with the loss and major internal labor dollars, cuts deep!

Before signing we did our due diligence, as best we knew how. Our team read the pro and con reviews. We took particular note of one review which said get everything in writing prior to signing. Our attempt to do so was to compile an excel doc that listed specifics of everything we needed the system to do for our custom bakery. We received a “yes” we can on the majority of the listed items. Our team sent multiple emails and cataloged them all, from pre-purchase, sales rep dialogue, on-boarding, initial program management, daily questions to various on-boarding team members, help line conference calls, management team conference calls, to and the summary of where the REVEL system failed us miserably. If you would like this information, we would be more than happy to forward you our packet of information. We hired an intern for 6 weeks who worked in tandem with a permanent team member, solely for the purpose of manage the on-boarding and conversion process; with the intent of expediting our transition from our old POS system to new REVEL system.

Our internal plan was so effective that within 2 weeks of receiving the equipment, we were able to ascertain that the REVEL system would not align with our business model. Our internal conversion team learned the platform so well, that they were able to ascertain operational components of the software the help desk and our assigned project manager was not aware (use of modifiers and order category classifications). Our team hit the ground running the day after the contract was signed.

I wish I'd gotten another POS. Am actively looking for another, despite knowing how destructive this would be to implement.

Revel Systems POS is a very powerful tool that is well-supported, constantly undergoing updates and improvements (and that our salesman and installer have been very easy to work with!) I have generally found tech support to be responsive and they have usually always helped me resolve any issues.

Overall, Revel is a good company. We are a small convenience store at a marina and campground and they are working well for us. One of the reasons we went with Revel is because they have teamed up with Shell Corp. to create an integration for fuel pumps and the Revel point of sales. Revel is the cheapest option on the market, that I was able to find, to be able to offer my customers pay at the pump options. This is still in the works, but they are making steady progress and I am excited for when we can try it out.

Once we were able to talk to tier two people, things improved.

Do your homework first and be thorough. DO not believe everything they tell you. The salespeople are polished. Serious waste of time and money.

My overall experience has not been positive since day one. There have been operational errors from the very beginning to the degree that using Revel has cost us money thru loss of customers who get frustrated with all the online ordering errors and just go elsewhere. Counter service has been slowed down due to having the system freeze up or force an unscheduled update in the middle of service. Customers get frustrated and the employees just make fun of your "provided services"

I stuck with Revel for the first two years of my business because of the desktop QuickBooks integration, which made things easier on my accountant and myself for bookkeeping. Now that they no longer host a Sync app, they are trying to force everyone onto QB online. The support agent I spoke to claimed that there was no way to export the data manually to desktop.

The system was clearly designed for restaurants and mangled into a retail space. There are all kinds of restaurant related options that are unrelated to a retail boutique, but have to be navigated around. Many issues with dashboard navigation, ability to adjust errors without complicating inventory accounting, etc. I've tried to call during peak business times to solve customer issues and been kept on hold for literally hours. When I tried to reach out to the sales person who sold me the system, all emails and calls went unreturned.

After 2 years of fighting with this system to make it work in my space, with terrible support and a high suprise costs, I'm giving up. The last reason I held out was the ease of passing through to my accountant. Now that that has been made even more difficult, I will be switching to another system this summer.

Horrible