BevSpot vs. Lavu vs. TouchBistro

For a small company with little inventory, Lavu is a great simple POS system. For a larger company or a company where items are always changing, I would not recommend Lavu as more transactions increases room for error and ultimately takes away the time one doesn't have to figure out how to reconcile something. Customer service is not always able to fix the problem right away and can take months getting back to you on the reasoning behind a discrepancy in reports.

Incentivized

It's a tried and true system, over the years I have always had a great experience. Capturing sales is easy and it's extremely user friendly and easy to train staff on. While I have tried other systems and they have not been as easy or user friendly there are some more advanced technology and backend capabilities that TouchBistro could work on. Maybe just a little updating.

• The Lavu system is incredibly easy to use in both front and back of house operations. The format of both sides is very intuitive.
• Lavu makes it very easy to add real life application to teaching inventory control, schedule control, etc.
• The fact that it is cloud based makes life much easier. I can make changes on the fly and they update very quickly.

Incentivized

• Allows the user to set up specific food modifiers that can be used on one or more menu items.
• Displays the kitchen orders and tracks the time they were received and shows alerts when time is getting late
• Reporting on staff hours and breaks taken.
• Flexibility with different tax options.
• Splitting checks multiple ways

Incentivized

• Split check credit card transactions, seem to have issues with some of the checks not closing out properly or being charged correctly
• Servers being allowed to run server summary even though they have unpaid checks (not supposed to happen)
• Have had the system go out on a weekend and took 20 plus minutes to get back online
• Calling the help desk on the weekend is a joke, takes 45 to 90 minutes to get help

Incentivized

• One of my biggest (and only) issues with Touch Bistro is that it doesn’t integrate well with the credit card processing systems we use. Currently, we use Square and while the two systems do communicate, there are some instances, such as paying with gift cards, that take a few extra steps, which can be a pain when you have a long line of customers!
• Because my credit card processing is separate from Touch Bistro there are a few things that are hard to track. Square does a great job of marketing and tracking the marketing, but it’s not accurate for me due to the fact that I use Touch Bistro as a POS and not Square.
• I’d love for Touch Bistro to offer more marketing techniques that are easy to use.

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.

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 has a simpler interface but lower quality reporting for accountants.

Incentivized

Harbortouch has a very robust POS system however it has issues that we do not seem to have with TouchBistro. One of the issues with Harbortouch is if the internet goes down, the credit card reader will not work and actually lock of the POS system causing extra customer wait times while their food is getting cold. TouchBistro's system will still capture the card info even when the internet is down and process it when the internet is working again

Incentivized

• LAVU has fit perfectly into both the business and teaching usage areas for me. I feel I got an extra return on investment.

Incentivized

• The software is easy to understand and use
• We could not find a case for the iPads that would also fit the third party card reader so we went without. This resulted in card readers breaking off in the charging port rendering the iPad useless.
• Reports were available in real time, so it was extremely easy to see sales and make quick decisions.

Incentivized