Lightspeed Retail is a retail PoS system from Lightspeed headquartered in Quebec. Core retail POS features are expanded on higher service tiers with ecommerce option and payments gateway, an accounting system, and a customer loyalty program.
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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.
It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.
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.
Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand.
Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics.
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.
With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items.
Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified).
Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.)
Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations.
Weak system for receiving purchase orders.
Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this.
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.
I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.
Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not
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.
