Does your card machine work with my till? Why I say no.

Most pub and restaurant owners get bombarded with calls from card machine people. Whether one turns up at the bar or rings you on a Tuesday afternoon, the first thing you ask them is always the same. "Does your machine integrate with my EPOS?"

It is a yes or a no, and you ask it for a perfectly sensible reason. Everything about your business lives on that till. Your products, your prices, your staff, your stock, the lot. You are not going to run the risk of swapping it out and finding your business cannot function on a Saturday. So you ask the question because it is the path of least resistance. If the answer is yes, happy days. You might save a bit on your rates too. The card machine man has his sale, moves on to the next one, and it is probably the last time you will ever see him.

Here is the bit nobody says out loud. The vast majority of card machine salespeople know nothing about the till you are running. They know whether their machine integrates with it, yes or no, and that is the end of their interest. It is not their bag. It is not their background. Their expertise is earning commission on selling one of these things, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it does not get anywhere near what most operators actually want, which is a fast, effective system that helps them run the place and tells them something useful about how it is doing.

So when an owner asks me "does your machine integrate with my EPOS?", I say no. They usually go, "all right, what's the reason for that then?"

The reason is that I do not know what you need until we have had a chat about it. Some people want the all-singing, all-dancing set-up: stock, staff management, payroll, the full reporting suite. Some people just want "press pay and it comes up on the card machine" and nothing more, because that alone stops staff keying prices into the card machine by hand, getting them wrong, and slowing service down at the busiest moment of the week. Until I understand which of those you are, or whether you are somewhere in between, I cannot answer the integration question with any confidence or clarity, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I am independent, which means I am not tied to one provider for tills or for card machines. Once we have had that conversation I can put together a system that fits what you do, rather than whatever I happen to have in the van. And because I have run bars, pubs and restaurants of my own and used a lot of these systems behind my own bar, I know which ones are fit for purpose and which ones only look good in the brochure.

Here is how the usual set-up works. You have a till, and you have a card machine, and the two of them talk to each other over the wifi. Nothing wrong with that on a good day.

The trouble starts when something goes wrong or you just have a question. The poor old owner rings the till company and gets told, "nothing to do with us, ring the card machine people." So he rings the card machine people and, lo and behold, gets sent straight back to the till company. Round and round. All that does is wind you up further, and it never gets to the reason it happened in the first place.

From experience: things very rarely go wrong at nine o'clock on a Monday morning. If you are a pub, they go wrong at ten o'clock on a Friday night with a bar full of people all wanting to pay. If they cannot pay, your business is rather stuffed. That is the moment the ping-pong really costs you.

The vast majority of the times a till stops talking to a card machine, it is because the wifi has dropped. The wifi has nothing to do with the till provider or the card machine provider, but the owner quite reasonably sees it all as one system, because that is how it was sold to them.

However good and fast the broadband people say their speeds are, even a fibre line never seems to deliver what it promised, and a busy pub full of phones does not help. When the signal dips, the till and the card machine lose each other, everybody blames the kit, and you are back on the phone being bounced between two companies who are both, technically, right that it is not their fault.

The point: the fix is not a better card machine. The fix is to take the wifi hop out of the picture altogether.

This is why I do more and more work with Square, and specifically with their Register.

It is a till with a customer display on the front. When it is not in use, the display can show your logo. When it is in use, it shows the customer what they are about to pay. And the important bit: that customer display is also the card reader. The customer taps their card on the screen they have just been looking at. There is no separate card machine, so there is no wifi link between till and card machine to fall over on a Friday night.

I think it is a brilliant bit of design, and it goes an awfully long way towards taking the single biggest failure point out of a busy bar. If your current set-up already does this, I will tell you so. If it does not, this is usually where the conversation goes. You can see the kit I actually put in rather than the kit someone is paid to push.

I am perplexed as to why the card machine providers have not got on board with this. I might be completely wrong, so treat this as my opinion, but here is what I think. A card machine provider wants to flog you a machine at twenty or twenty-five pounds a month on a two-year rental. If they can say "yes, our machine integrates with your till", they have got you for two years, job done, and that is why you never see them again.

Now imagine that same salesman walks into a pub and the owner says, "I don't need a separate card machine, my till has the card reader built in." The whole pitch falls apart. It removes the rental, and it removes the wifi problem that the rental was quietly relying on you not understanding.

Taking the card machine out of the wifi equation solves the biggest issue. It does not solve a broadband line that drops every time it rains.

That is why we have recently added a dedicated Starlink service alongside the tills. We supply the kit and set it up, and we can provide a business connection that runs over satellite rather than whatever line happens to come up the lane. It is entirely separate from your customer wifi, so the football stream in the corner cannot take your payments down with it. I know some people do not have a great deal of time for the man who owns it, but on the reliability and the independence, my clients who have gone this way have found it well worth doing.