Toast POS

Toast allows users to log on to its website to edit menu items, run reports, track punch-in's. In the past, POS systems were loaded into desktops in the back office. It's so refreshing to update, edit, and from anywhere because it's based off a website.

The devices that Toast has selected for installation in the restaurants are modern, slim, and highly functional.

Toast can slow down, which isn't good news when the restaurant is busy.

The sales tracking is still not as robust as I would hope from a product that does so much else so well. For instance, it can be hard to get results on the sales of a menu item for an entire year.

I signed on to Toast because they touted themselves as software specifically for restaurants so I thought it would be an easy transition. It was not. As a POS system the functionality is fine. Servers can ring in food and it prints where we tell it but good luck pulling even basic, typical reports any restaurant would need. A lot of the reports I would want are listed as possible but then they don't populate with actual numbers. Support has no clue. I can wait to talk to a support person for 20 minutes sometimes or even get a "we'll call you back" which comes 24 hours or more later which is such a bummer when I have a guest waiting for a check and I need support to do it. When I do get them on the line they know about as much as I do about how to work the software.

Toast talks big and presents a front like they know what they are doing but they don't seem to grasp even simple financial or restaurant concepts. Do your servers split tips with a bartender or other support staff? Too bad because you are going to need to create your own spreadsheet outside the system to do that and then tediously go day by day to get the tip info for payroll. It is significantly more expensive than what I was doing before and they forced me to buy all their hardware, like printers and tablets which is dumb. Any old tablet would work better than theirs because they have it locked so we can't play music through it or manage our Instagram account. The list of problem s is too long to even go into here. DO NOT GET SUCKERED INTO RUNNING PAYROLL THROUGH THEM. The payroll program is a complete and utter joke. They have no clue.

Nice features and ways to set up the menu for ease of use by employees. User-friendly up to a certain extent.

Most of the features promised by the sales rep were all available at an extra cost, after paying a lot of money already for the system and the hardware, you have to pay extra for EVERYTHING. Their customer support is very unreliable, sometimes you have someone great who knows exactly what you are talking about, sometimes it seems like the person has never even used the POS before... They put you on hold for 10+ minutes at a time too.

It is so easy to make changes & push them to the terminals. Easy to manage from home rather than having to be onsite all the time. Credit card payments are received in a timely manner & customer service has always taken great care of us. Also a great point is that you can keep running when the internet goes down. It's not perfect, but it's the best that we've seen.

Servers complain that when you close the credit card orders that you have to enter your POS number again. I complain because I can't see more than 24 months of information and can only see it 6 months at a time. I wish that sales were assigned to the time frame they were purchased at and not at the time that the ticket was opened.