Oracle Hospitality is the successor to MICROS eCommerce software, modular software dedicated to the needs of airlines, hotels and resports, sport venues, restaurants and bars, and others.
The MICROS Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems are available and now offered by Oracle since the acquisition of MICROS Systems in 2014, and are now part of the Oracle Hospitality Suite.
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Square POS
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Square POS is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as accept credit cards with your iPhone, Android, and iPad along with the flexibility to accept credit card payments anywhere, from Square headquartered in San Francisco, California.
In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.
Square was absolutely fantastic when I first started using it. Easy to set up, use, changing settings, and the like. It has evolved over the years, almost too much, to an insane amount of options, apps, settings, et cetera. I would like to see options for just utilizing specific parts, such as invoices, versus the entire system being set up for daily sales. It makes the tracking side of things a little wonky when you only send 2-5 invoices/month for larger projects. Overall, I like that it’s familiar to me, which is why I continue to use it
After you set a daily processing deadline time, charges processed by that time are deposited the next business day.
The reporting dash board looks overwhelming but that's because it has all of the the information that you've processed before. That was invaluable when we recently went to look at the detail on a two year old transaction and were able to find the information by ourselves.
The ability to use multiple devices is great. We can process charges on a computer, a tablet, or even a smartphone.
Receipts are automatically sent to the customer's preferred email or texted to their phone.
The cost of the hardware (specific scanners and receipt printers) was prohibitive for my company, and whilst we managed without them, they would have been nice to have. The range of scanners and printers that integrate with Square is small, so despite our devices' capabilities to read barcodes (we used ipads) and the Zebra receipt/label printers we had, we couldn't use either as the system wouldn't integrate with them.
Whilst Square's credit card reader is nifty in design, it's a bit small and lacking substance to have as a customer-facing reader so it really needs the dock the company offers. The dock is awkward to open to reset or pair the reader. We often found pairing the reader with the device running the system tricky and confusing, relying on pressing one button and then interpreting a sequence of lights that often caused confusion. The pairing process might have been clearer presented through the device rather than the reader.
I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.
We find Square POS is very user friendly. Its interface is customizable to our needs and very easy to use. Before we adopted Square POS, we used a combination of solutions from different manufacturer to try and achieve a portion of the functionality that Square POS provides under only 1 login
Square POS support is good, I would not say they are great. There is a good knowledge base that you can access and there are other service providers who support Square POS who can assist you, but I find that the lack of help and support for setting it up for different industries is a let down. We had to research for hours just to find a solution to fix our need for a billing option for services for example. It would be great if Square POS broadened its support and solutions for various industries.
CenterEdge is the point of sale we replaced 5 years ago and it was not by choice. I could get into specifics as to why the change was made to Micros but for our type of business, it is just not a good fit. I've said this countless times and I will say it again, Micros is great for restaurants and bars just not for our business model. If you have one of those types of businesses where you just sell food and drink, go for it! But if you need something that will tie multiple attractions, food and beverage, and entertainment into one point of sale. Look elsewhere like CenterEdge, which I have reviewed on here and is great for FECs. We have moved back to as it works with our type of business.
Square POS is just the easiest to use and therefore the easiest to onboard new users to. I'd also like to point out, that if you're missing or lost one of the readers it's so easy to buy one at an Apple store or even other merchants like T-mobile or Verizon. WePay had less fees but was harder to onboard new users to. Eventbrite had really high fees.
The transaction fees and charge rates are much higher than other options available. We only used this system for a short time while we were switching to a MUCH cheaper option (Authorize.net).
I have also used this system with a charity that I volunteer with who only uses it during a couple of fundraisers a year when they have a small gift shop set up to sell donated goods to raise money. For such low volume, the fees aren't as big of a deal and the convenience of being able to take cards no matter where the event is located makes it worth it.
This is a system your average consumer will recognize and trust, so there's that.
