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.
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TouchBistro
Score 6.0 out of 10
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TouchBistro is a complete mobile POS solution on the iPad for the restaurant industry. It allows users to manage reservations, view the menu, take orders and review sales reports with a few simple touches. Instead of servers repeatedly moving between customers and terminals for order management, servers can remain with customers and instantly submit orders to the kitchen and bar. Servers no longer need to write down an order and then enter it into a distant terminal. TouchBistro's single entry…
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
