Chowly, headquartered in Chicago, integrates 3rd party online ordering apps with restaurant POS applications, providing a consistent ordering system.
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Maitre'D
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Maitre'D point of sale (POS) from Posera headquartered in Montreal is a retail POS solution quick serve or table service restaurants, hotels, bars or nightclubs, and other venues. It consists of both hardware and software. Additionally, Maitre'D can be extended to provide restaurants with back office functions such as workforce and inventory management, cash management, events management, and sales forecasting.
I would not recommend Chowly to any restaurant that is trying to push orders through to their POS from a third party delivery site. Any restaurant would be much better off finding a third party site that integrates directly with their POS. Using Chowly was more of a headache than it needed to be and our company switched to Checkmate (also not great) after a year with Chowly.
Maitre'D is great in a shop where multiple terminals are needed. Servers and Bartenders can use any terminal they are near (there are some exceptions, but that is up to the location to make terminals tied to people or not).
On the other hand, a small single terminal shop would be a good fit for Maitre'D, there are much less expensive options for the smaller need.
Maitre'd allows us to use their Broadcaster module to push product and pricing updates to all five of our regions, simplifying product rollout and updates.
The program is versatile and allows for integration with loyalty and online ordering systems, however that does require some advanced technical knowledge to properly execute.
The program is easy to learn from a cashier and management standpoint, new hires can get up to speed quickly which helps minimize required training time and ultimately labor hours.
Maitre'D could make better use of pick lists, especially when it comes to the delivery and take-out orders. The interface is out-dated and feels awkward and needlessly cumbersome.
When a problem (bug) is discovered, I would like to see better and more rapid response from the company.
Major improvements are slow to happen. I am on the same major version as I started with 7 years ago and I believe there are customers still using the prior version. This seems like too long for a company to allow old versions to live and must force them to support too many different variations. This situation has to detract from the company to develop new and better capabilities.
Access to raw data is not possible, custom reports are not available. I consider this a major drawback. Entering a lot of new items, or changing a lot of item information is painful. Changes are made item by item, no bulk edits. For example, let's say I want to increase the price of beer by $1 and I have 50 types of beers, I will need to modify 50 individual items, that is easily more than an hour's work.
Chowly was not as good as Checkmate, though I cannot in good faith recommend either. We ended up switching over to Checkmate after a year with Chowly due to our dissatisfaction with the service.
We have been on various versions of Maitre'd for about ten years now and came from conventional cash registers. Maitre'd obviously added tremendous value in that situation. As far as looking to the future goes, we have compared Maitre'd to various competitors and found our biggest knock on it is they haven't moved to a cloud model yet.
My shop needs a POS to operate efficiently. We are too large to go manual, there would be way too many mistakes. Maitre'D is a good choice for our need.
The Berg liquor pouring control system has a native interface into Maitre'D and our return on investment was 4 or 5 months.
