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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Northstar Restaurant POS
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Custom Business Solutions (CBS) in Irvine, California offers Northstar, a restaurant dedicated point of sale system supporting all restaurants from quick serve to fine dining, as well as bars, cruises, and amusement parks.
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.
The Northstar Restaurant POS is the POS system specifically designed for Country Clubs. It works well in a Country Club scenario where things need to be customized to member preferences, and there are a large number of menu items. If there is a restaurant where the menu is simpler, without as much customization needed, the Northstar Restaurant POS may be a bit too large and cumbersome. The Northstar Restaurant POS is good for detail but not necessarily speed.
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.
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.
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
I have not used any other restaurant POS systems. I have heard there are more robust restaurant POS systems available; however, very few of them are so customizable for our needs. Being a Country Club, our focus is on member service. Northstar Restaurant POS allows us to have a large number of menu items available so we can serve our members effectively.
