Revel Systems

Just what I needed (and didn't even know that I needed!)

Commentaires : We have now been live with our new Revel POS for a week. Naturally, there were a few issues during the switch over, but most of those were a) problems with my setup and b) easily corrected with help from the on-boarding team, tech support folks and very comprehensive online documentation. As of this writing, I believe we are finally “there.” I am really liking Revel’s product. To be honest, I had no idea how much I was missing out on these past 4 years. I had just assumed that a mature and viable POS product did not exist in the iPad/Cloud arena. I assumed, incorrectly it would seem, that to get such a product I would have to one day shell out thousands or tens of thouands of dollars for one of the “big guys” with expensive hardware. I’m glad to have been proven incorrect in that assumption. In my mind, one of the absolute best features of Revel is that it is so highly configurable. I have been able to create a POS that meets my business needs as well as the needs of my employees and guests. So far I have not had to “settle” for a configuration that works for “most” people. Instead I have found that I can tell Revel how I want it to work for me and it just works that way. I've never understood why most cloud-based POS companies think that they know more about running our businesses than those of us who are in the trenches. I have been delighted to realize that Revel is willing to put in the effort to create a POS that works they way we work. There is no one-size-fits-all, especially in restaurants. Revel's designers and engineers seem to understand that fact. Little things like the following mean the world to me: 1) I can specify negative modifiers — ones that deduct from the price. Now my guests can truly have it their way and only pay for what they want. While I've always run my cafe that way, only Revel has allowed me to do that without a lot of unnecessary steps.
2) I can set up default modifiers, and more importantly when a guest doesn’t want that default it is easy to specify at the POS and it is obvious for the kitchen.
3) The flexibility of defining “one size fits all” modifier groups, and tailoring those to the needs of each product that uses them, has made my life so much easier. The modifier features are amazing, and I've just begun to scratch the surface of what is available.
4) And don’t even get me started on recipes. How I ever lived without those in my POS is a mystery. I guess I lived without them because I never knew I needed them! In the past two days, my employees and I have been able to identify menu items whose gross margins are dragging us down. Since all of our products come with so many options, this has always been a hard, time-consuming thing to do, involving lots of spreadsheets and number crunching. Now that I have nearly all of my recipes defined, I’m able to run one Product Mix report whenever I want and identify problems before they become catastrophes. That alone makes the “extra” expense of the monthly Revel hosting fee worth it. Even in a small shop, such as mine, inventory control is a nightmare. It has become very obvious to me that after a month or two this task will get much easier. Once I have finished tweaking my product and recipe definitions, I’m looking forward to “knowing” my inventory status with just the touch of a button. I know it won’t be completely accurate — no theoretical inventory system can possibly account for human error. But, I already can tell that it will be much more accurate than I’ve ever had before, and it will be more accurate without the drudgery of weekly physical inventories. I would be remiss if I did not give a shout-out to your on-boarding and tech support people. They all proved to be very helpful, and very willing to let me go at my pace in this process. I am a tech geek from the days of Univac and IBM mainframes, punch cards and programming languages that are long dead and buried. Though I am now a chef I have never lost my love of all things tech. It was a pleasure to work with people who let me control the process as I was learning Revel. Their on-boarding team is willing to do as much, or as little, as their new clients need to get them up and running quickly. If I had to sum up my early experiences with Revel and the switch over, that sentence would be ---- I now feel like I am more in control of my business, that I understand my business better. As we enter our fifth year, a year that looks to be like it will be on schedule to be our first true profit year, that is huge. I'm looking forward to learning how Revel can help make that first profit year even more profitable. Sure, there is always room for improvement. Revel, like most mPOS companies, needs to get their integrated EMV/contactless functionality up and running, not just for one or two payment processing companies, but for all of them. Having said that, I realize how expensive and how difficult that task is. But, if they get it done quickly and correctly, they will be a hard company to beat. A few other reviewers mentioned one suggestion I will echo -- be prepared to spend some time learning what you have with Revel, and what it can do for you. Myself, I spent hours looking at every setting, reading the help bubbles for every setting, and making notes about what I did and did not want to implement. I asked a lot of questions. I watched a lot of videos. When I wasn't sure, I created tests, ran them and looked at the results. Most importantly, I spent two days keying the same orders into both my current POS and Revel, looking for discrepancies and errors in my setup. Sure, that all took a lot of time. But taking a lot of time up front means spending less time fighting fires after going live. What I'm trying to say is don't think you are going to get your hardware and go live in a week. I budgeted a month for training, setup and troubleshooting before I ever thought about going live. I think a month is the MINIMUM time needed in order to do it right, and I have set up a lot of POS systems in my career. Remember -- as restaurants, our POS is the hub of our data and data analysis. We wouldn't short-change our recipe development, or training our cooks and other staff. To succeed, we need great data that tells us everything we need to know about our business. Revel can be that vital hub, but only if we take the necessary time and effort in the beginning. And, with that, I'll step down from my soapbox.

Avantages :

Flexibility -- ability to configure to work the way MY BUSINESS works Customer support and training

Inconvénients :

Needs to get their integrated EMV/contactless payment integration up and running. Currently that only works for one or two payment processors.

System Admin for Beauty Company with 4+ years of Revel experience

Commentaires : My role with Estee Lauder is Retail Business analyst for Le Labo brand. Because they use Revel which is unique to any other Estee Lauder brand, my responsibility is also system admin of the Revel software. From my usage perspective, I enjoy that it is self contained and there's not much we cant make it do to support our business needs. Over half of the problems we face actually are not with Revel at all, but the way have we extract data from Revel's server to publish to our master system (SAP) and supporting that integration. This was architected and is maintained by our organization.

Avantages :

Revel is very valuable to Le Labo brand because as beauty brand that creates hand blended perfume, we need to track all of the inventory at an ingredient level. From a Retail POS and inventory management perspective, Revel is a shining star. Deployment is easy, just download the app, provision, and as long as you have an internet connection, you're on your way.

Inconvénients :

CRM and eCommerce integration have been challenges for us, but not at the fault of Revel really. Being the large enterprise we are, the other areas of our business are cemented in the platforms that they use already, and thus there is no out of the box integration available for features beyond the core POS/Inventory that we rely on. The path forward would be for our organization to create new custom integrations to match our own internal business requirements. As far as a Revel review, the features that we do use and the support that we receive has been top notch.

100% Fail - Waste of Valuable Time and Money

Commentaires : Long and short, our experience with the Revel systems POS (our intent is to use it in Retail application) has been a nightmare. The problems started early on in being sold hardware components that were not designed to work in the way we needed to utilize them - despite us being very detailed in what we needed - and despite the Sales reps assurances they would (specifically the barcode scanners and printers). We purchased our system in Mid-March but due to delays in the build-out of our store front and arrival of inventory components we were not actually able to begin the on-boarding/product and inventory load until Mid-May and that's when things turned awful. Our initial product information load seemed to go well, however when we attempted to load the corresponding inventory via the method instructed it would not load. Come to find out we were given incorrect instructions and fields/information that should have been on the load sheet were not there. That issue began 5/15 and was finally resolved 5/17. On 5/16 another set of issues started during the attempt at setting up our receipt with logo, company info, etc (figured we'd do that while the inventory thing got figured out. Wrong!) That was finally figured out and resolved by our onboard rep on 5/17 at the end of the day... with zero explanation as to what the issue was and if it could happen again. Since we were finally able to go ahead and get the first phase of products/inventory info loaded (our onboard rep did it for us because no matter what or how we tried it was unsuccessful) we scheduled our POS front end training on 5/19 - which also was a bust because we learned that none of our printers were correctly configured before our system was sent. This also stalled us from being able to barcode the items in the store until 5/26 when that issue was finally resolved with one of our barcode printers and the receipt printer (it is now 6/15 and the second printer for our warehouse still hasn't been configured... we have literally been dealing with daily issues with the backend system and front end system all this time and haven't even been able to address that yet). Other issues that occurred (that are now resolved but no one can explain the how or why it happened, or will it happen again?) where the backend system spontaneously dumped my login information on 6/7. Our rep basically had to reset me up (2 more days down). Thought we were finally good... got to the actual POS and discovered that the login PINs for myself and 3 of our employees did not work (despite the 3 employees info being present and correct in the backend - my information erased again and defaulted to a generic 1234). Got that sorted a couple days later. This weeks issue has been with the integration to Quick Books online. The POS is sending inaccurate info to QBO - and of course, no one can tell us why, or worse, how to correct it. One generally assumes that in business accurate financial reporting is kind of a thing... I mean Revel hasn't had a problem charging us the monthly fee all this time and I'm sure they track that somewhere, right? Naturally in the month from 5/15 to today, 6/15, we finally hit our limit and requested information on returning the system (being willing to take the risk of being without a POS system at our opening and just processing manually through QBO). Our onboard rep passed us on to Client Relations and a few days later we finally get a generic, and frankly offensive, email from customer rep that in no way acknowledged our issues and frustrations - but instead had a copy of our Revel contact attached. I assume the point was to put it out there that Revel only has a 30 day return policy (keep in mind rep didn't say that in his email... he pretty much implied "figure it out for yourself"). Of course, since we bought our system in March we are well beyond the 30 day limit. I really could keep going. I am just shy of now 100 emails back and forth about issue, after issue, after issue - none of which truly got any clear resolution or explanation. I'll save you some time. Do not buy this system. Its bad, the customer support is worse, and like us some of you will likely end up tossing a system in the storage room and going to another platform.

Inconvénients :

Please see comments for a play by play and definitely look to other systems (the more I look into this, the more negative reviews I am finding that are sadly similar to our own).

Amazing features and functionality for accurate business analysis

Commentaires : Give your customer service agents at your call centers raises! I have spent dozens of hours on the phone and talked to numerous people from all over and every single one of them has surpassed all expectations of product knowledge and customer service! That makes a world of difference!

Avantages :

The features from a business owner's perspective are unparalleled. Everything is totally customizable tofu the specific and unique needs of individual businesses. The customer service alone makes this worth the money. I have never looked forward to calling customer service before, but the training of the employees of not just product knowledge, but also customer service is absolutely unmatched.

Inconvénients :

I have three specific areas of opportunity for Revel. 1) Taking payments of split checks (especially when one guest leaves earlier than others) is the worst system of any modern systems I have ever worked with. After splitting the checks, it is impossible to change the way you split the items if one guest has already paid and left. This really needs to be addressed if the product is going to be marketed to full service restaurants that have to deal with split payments on almost every party of 3 or more. 2) While I appreciate its modern focus, it is not easy to work with if a restaurant still uses paper gift certificates. 3) We were a "Guinea Pig" test restaurant for a salesman that had never worked with Revel before. He provided absolutely no help at all in setting up the system as he didn't know much about it himself. Even after he got back from training, he had to call customer service to answer simple questions I had. For such a complex and intricate system, there should be protocols in place for better training of the people selling it to be able to set it up for the customers.

Revel POS system

Commentaires : Same system used for different areas of our business where we had different POS systems in past. Easier for administration, bookeeping, etc.

Avantages :

Offers both retail and restaurant versions of software that works for our company, which includes a retail operation (winery & brewery) as well as a separate cafe operation.

Inconvénients :

"CRM" customer management is lacking on the management side; purchase reporting only available for periods of 12 months rather than entire history for customer. Reports auto load prior to dates being entered; spend a lot of time waiting for a report to load to then enter actual period wanted for report.Features removed during updates (no longer have receipt option when comping items; for winery/brewery operations we comp out bottles used for tastings on a daily basis and used these receipts routinely, only to have the feature disappear with an update).Quite expensive for our seasonal business; we need several stations during busy months but have to pay quite a bit even when several are not used during slow months.