Revel Systems

"Great "

Pros: It's easy to learn and accessible. Having it on an Ipad means that it's large enough to know what button is being pressed, and to move things around if need be. Having categories set up is great so we can keep track of how much change we need or how many people came in to visit the museum, that day.

Cons: It can get a little complicated especially with adding discounts to certain purchases which can be difficult for our older volunteers to get a hold of. But is really it, on the basic side of things, it works well and does the job efficiently.

"Extensive functionality"

Comments: Despite the technical issues, our experience with Revel has been great due to its user-friendliness and extensive functionality.

Pros: Revel has a lot of features that allow us to easily keep track of our visitor numbers and inventory. The system is very easy for our staff to use and it requires very little training.

Cons: We have run into numerous technical issues with Revel and their customer service has not been very helpful when resolving some issues.

"They will keep taking your money after you have finished with the software"

Comments: The tech support people are nice. The sales team don't care. The accounts will take your money and not give you the service.

Pros: Everything in one place like online ordering.

Cons: Complicated and were happy to charge for any addition or even when the service was cancelled they kept charging and would not refund. They said they can not refund even though no service was provided. Problems with accounts and over charging was a common occurance during our two years with Revel. I would highly recommend people look at other systems before going with Revel.

"Only good if your needs are very Basic"

Comments: Overall Revel is a total letdown and will be replaced by year end with a better system, lots of things we were promised could be done require using their "Open API" which costs more per month than the entire POS system does for 5 stations. We were not told about the API pricing upfront (or that there was even a cost at all, it was pitched like it was included in the regular fee) just that we could use the API to do everything we told them we needed to do, my project manager informed me of the API pricing during our implementation, when I called out the sales rep for never mentioning the additional cost despite repeated conversations about how critical this was she told me "its not my job to tell you the pricing for the API since that's not my department" It is also very difficult to impossible to find and load an order in the dashboard by customer. You have to load the customers orders report, find the customer in the list, click show orders, note the order number, then go to the order history report and then you can click through to the order, why isn't the order number under customers order a hyperlink to take me to the order? They made a systems change to batch process updates to the POS instead of in realtime, we have a custom app that we use for check ins when a customer comes into the store and it adds customers to the revel system so we can link them to a sale and track close rate etc. They used to sync in real time from the dashboard to the stations, after a recent update it takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes for the customers to pull down from the revel dashboard. I have verified they show up on the dashboard instantly as they should, there is just a major delay in syncing back to the iPads now that was not there before the update. Reporting is very weak in certain areas, you can't view profit by anything other than employee which is worthless if you don't have pay rates loaded which we don't since we aren't using that aspect of the system. When we receive inventory in the store, we upload it into the revel dashboard via their excel template this works about 75% of the time, the rest of the time it just silently fails, you will never receive any notice that it failed, where it failed etc. So now before I do any uploads, I do an export of what we have immediately before so when it fails I can compare to the inventory after the partial upload to figure out where the import stopped so I can import the rest. I could keep going but bottom line is if your needs are more than barebones or you are not a restaurant you should look elsewhere for a much better solution.

Pros: Overall they have a nice POS interface and it is pretty stable. Their pricing is also pretty good for the base system.

Cons: Functions are hard to find
Very much geared towards restaurants, so if you are in another business be prepared to see restaurant specific stuff all over you can't turn off
Material changes to the way things work with zero notice
Can only see profit margin by employee no P&L type report.
Inventory uploads regularly fail with no notice, and no way to tell what was added without doing a manual compare of before and after and trying again with the additional items.

"Good idea, good realization on the hardware concept, but buggy software"

Comments: Sales, inventory, predictions, CRM, marketing - all nicely done.

Pros: It is full wifi, full cloud, very versatile and very nice and sleek.

Cons: iOS only, apple only, comes out expensive, heavy toll on the pay as you go needs (licensing tied to number of terminals)