Revel Systems

Just what I needed (and didn't even know that I needed!)

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.

Not for the technology newbie....

The only reporting feature I would love to see is comparative reports so I don't have to piece them together. I want to know things like "sales last March versus sales this March", and "labor last month versus this month". That's how we track trends and right now we have to export as excel and wrote our own formulas to analyze this data. Overall, a good system for our small business.

Full of Glitches

We've been with Revel for about 8 months now. I am on the phone with customer support weekly, nearly daily. Our initial integration with Quickbooks was not well supported by their staff and eventually I had to just teach myself how to get the system set up and integrated. We have constantly had issues that when I contact customer service they tell me they don't know why it happened and it must be a glitch in the software. My credit card machine broke after 7 months and Revel could not figure out how to fix it so I called the manufacturer and they told me it was a software issue. Revel's solution was to trade in for a new one, rather than try to figure out what the software issue was. The first customer service agent I spoke to did not even have the manual for the pin pad that I was using.

Multiple times Revel has stopped speaking to Quickbooks without warning and our data has not been pushed through as it should. I've been told that the exchange feature that is built in to the front end of the system does not actually work and so we should stop using it and do a work around so that our entries into Quickbooks will be correct. My completed invoices have gotten stuck between the Ipad and the back office and the payments have therefore not been received into Quickbooks until I discovered the problem. Revel has multiple times overtaken Quickbooks and changed the vendor information in Quickbooks. After multiple phone calls to customer support for a single issue I've eventually been told that my system is out of date and that's what's causing the problem, but it was never brought up in initial phone calls. In the same vein, there is no indication from Revel that I should update the system. In fact for the last update, the app told me that it was the most up to date, but finally on the back end of Revel there was a warning that I needed to update or my system would be obsolete. In fact I was running the most up to date version of the app, but what needed to be done was to download an entirely new app-that was not made clear in Revel's warning, I just happened to figure it out myself. Furthermore, had I not happened to log into Revel's back end on that particular day, I would not have known that I was required to update.

One day the back office stopped sending our daily emailed reports. When I spoke to customer support they told me that it was because the email addresses where the report was sent were separated by commas and not semi-colons. When I mentioned that the commas had been working for 7 months they told me that it was due to an update on their back end that now required semi-colons. When asked how I was supposed to know that and change it I was told that it had been a "known issue" for over a month and that some businesses had a problem and some didn't so they didn't let customers know about the issue.

With all the issues I've had, I've never been able to speak to a supervisor or had any kind of conciliatory gesture like a reduced price made for me and in fact had to pay shipping to and from returning my credit card machine. When I speak to customer service about issues related to Quickbooks integration, they are not trained on Quickbooks so generally cannot help me.

Overall the system is extremely glitchy and inconsistent. It cannot be counted on to work the same way from day to day.

Revel POS--a powerful tool for hospitality and retail

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.

Excellent System that Works Great

We have had others system and this just works great for us. It has a pretty good inventory system and a host of reports. The key is its makes the sales process easy. I have no problem giving Revel a strong recommendation.