Spruce vs. TouchBistro

I think my single most surprising and satisfying experience with ECI and its RockSolid Maxx and then Spruce products was the ease of implementation and rollout -- both on the hardware and software side. ECI seems to have mastered the idea of using an integrated team along with robust tutorials to make that process easy.

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.

• lumber management.
• purchasing and receiving.
• Cloud based.

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

• Point of sales
• P&L usability

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.

For the most part when there is internet, we are able to log in and proceed to do our daily tasks which is very helpful, but we have also encountered a glitch on our laptop that we use to do inventory that switches to the last branch that was used. This, in combination with Spruce logging out of the remote connection daily, can cause issues if the person accessing Spruce does not have the remote connection password.

Incentivized

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

Spruce is possibly just above average. Not super impressed with usability and especially not impressed with tech support who is rarely able to answer questions on the first call.

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

• With $13 million in gross and 40 employees I'm able to run a full back office with a staff of two. In today's tight labor market that is invaluable.
• Being able to implement Spruce with almost no upgrading or replacement of existing computer hardware represented a huge cost savings to us. I'm not even sure what dollar amount I could attach to that.
• Dealing with both a wholesale and retail customers requires that we provide different levels and kinds of reporting and documentation. Spruce has made it easy to respond to the different demands that those customers place upon us.

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