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Revel is an enterprise ready POS system that has functionality for towards retail and food service businesses. All the features are wrapped in a pleasing interface that is easy to navigate no matter which iPad you are using. To enhance the productivity of the system, Revel manufactures custom hardware that complements their software really well. Revel has a suite of apps which can be confusing to new users. The price may be appropriate for larger and enterprise businesses but is very steep for most independently owned businesses.
WHO IS REVEL A GOOD FIT FOR?
PRICE
Revel only displays the hardware pricing on their website, making it difficult to know the true cost of the system. A typical one terminal setup will cost around $1800-$2500, including the iPad. We have seen quotes with up front license costs and monthly fees as high as $99/month per iPad. Revel also has leasing options which vary in price based on the hardware needed.
FRONT OF THE HOUSE
Revel’s employee facing app runs on all iPads – Pro, regular, mini – and lets staff ring up orders, track and review customer order history, run basic reporting and much more.
Revel’s ordering interface is clean and easy to navigate for both, first timers and pros. For restaurants, the menu can be broken down into categories and sub-categories so even large menus can be navigated quickly. The ordering interface can also handle multiple courses and seat numbers for fine dining establishments.
Retail businesses can use the search feature or a barcode scanner for the fastest checkout. Items can have as many modifiers and variants as you can imagine, each with their own price.
Employees can quickly store customer information as they are processing the order. Customer name, phone, address, birthday and other common fields can be stored and retrieved quickly. The address field also ties in with Revel’s delivery tool which lets employees look up whether an address is within the delivery radius.
For restaurants and bars, Revel offers the ability to upload pictures of items, automatic happy hour pricing, named discounts and a built in loyalty offering. All these features help the growth of the business and are a must have in this fast changing point of sale world.
Revel’s iPad app lets employees and managers run basic reporting, especially end of day reporting. While there is a fully functional backend, a lot of the day to day managerial operations can be handled by the iPad app. For example, managers can refund credit card transactions without having to logon to the backend.
Another reason we found Revel to be enterprise ready is because of their offline mode. They are one of the few systems that is able to function fully while the internet is out. The system can send orders to the kitchen, print receipts and even accept gift and credit card transactions which means the customer experience isn’t affected at all by an internet outage.
MANAGEMENT
Revel’s backend is a perfect compliment to the iPad app. It expands on the enterprise level functionality offered to employees and really lets business owners manage and grow their business, no matter where they are.
The reporting is top notch. There are dozens of reports that help owners analyze their sales, keep their inventory fresh, provide detailed metrics on how the business is performing as a whole and much more.
We found the sales reporting to be comprehensive and providing enough customizability to suit the needs of a clothing boutique as well as a restaurant. Business owners can filter sales reports by category, sub-category or items. Inventory reporting lets owners see how much of each item is left and can go deeper to provide numbers on the various ingredients and their stock levels. This is very helpful for retailers to reduce their inventory costs and for restaurants to manage wastage. Another set of helpful reports is labor reporting which gives business owners insights on their profits at a macro level.
The various positions at foodservice and retail businesses call for strict employee controls. Revel offers business owners the ability to define exactly what each user can do on the iPad app as well as the backend. This is unique since most tablet POS systems limit the employee permission settings to just the iPad app.
To make accounting easier Revel integrates with Quickbooks and Xero. For payroll, they have partnered with ADP and Paychex. Business owners still have to sign up for these services independently but have to do less once the connection is made.
HARDWARE
Revel manufactures their own hardware and have partnered with leading manufacturers to offer a suite of hardware solutions. Revel’s sleek iPad stands comfortably hold the iPad while have the option of mounting an iPad mini on the back to serve as a customer facing display. Revel is compatible with the Epson TM-T88, TM-T70, TM-U220 series printers and Vasario cash drawers. Honewell barcode scanners and Zebra label printers finish off the hardware line.
SETUP
Revel offers support articles and Revel University for the business owners looking for a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) model. We have seen cases of Revel uploading inventory for customers for a fee, it is not something they do for each customer. There is a way to upload inventory and modifiers (for restaurants) which makes setup a lot less painful. All customers have access to the support team who can also help.
SUPPORT
Revel makes it easy to learn their system and get support. In addition to having support articles, they also offer ‘Revel University’ which is a collection of support articles geared towards teaching business owners more about specific features. The Revel Customer Care Team can be reached 24/7 via phone, email or by submitting a request through their website.
CONCLUSION
Revel is a robust point of sale system designed for fast paced and high volume businesses. Their retail and food service apps are both good at serving their respective markets. Their customized stands, routers and other hardware streamline the setup process and make operations easy. We recommend Revel for larger businesses that have a large budget and are willing to pay the higher monthly fees.
It works quite well for me
I show in comment most of the people’s review for the revel pos software is negative. So here I want to share an alternative to the revel pos software which is HDPOS Smart which is the best point of sale software.
Do NOT USE REVEL is all l can say. Revel agreed to transfer all the data from our previous POS into Revel, we have that in writing in an e mail. After paying up front for the hardware it all arrived, then they started invoicing us before the hardware was even installed let alone any data transfer taking place! That was back in July, it is now November, the data is still not transferred, they claim the promise of data transfer from their representative was too vague (what’s vague about data transfer) and they will not credit the invoices. We have a POS in place we cannot use. They are complete liars and not to be trusted in any way. Legal action is now pending. THE FULL CYCLE OF ALBURY.
As a business owner please do your due diligence and run from this company. After calling to stop the recurring billing from Revel and receiving a ticket 1245556, which stated it was being sent to billing department for cancellation. Revel continued to bill until i contacted them a second time. Their excuse of needing to speak to someone in client relations (Brian L.) first before they would cancel the service. No indication when the 1st request to cancel (Spoke with Agne) was made that I had to call or speak to anyone else. They go on and on about company policy and how I don
A Huge Mistake w/ Painful Ripple Effects. I want to convey concise specifics regarding where the decision to purchase the REVEL system went wrong without emotion but this process from start to finish coupled with the loss of over $3K and major internal labor dollars, cuts deep!
Before signing we did our due diligence, as best we knew how. Our team read the pro and con reviews. We took particular note of one review which said get everything in writing prior to signing. Our attempt to do so was to compile an excel doc that listed specifics of everything we needed the system to do for our custom bakery. We received a
This oversight by Revel is ridiculous. However, are you table service and do you need your servers or other employees to take credit card tips out of the cash drawer at the end of their shift? Or leave a receipt in the drawer of how much they took out? If so it’s not currently possible with Revision 2.22.9-61 or below for a server to print a basic tip report (unless you give them full financial access which includes labor rates for all other employees.). The iPad assigns the tip to whoever pays out the ticket when the customer leaves. So if your host uses his or her pin to close the ticket and the customer adds a tip that ticket is then assigned to the host rather than the waiter or waitress that helped them on the front end of revel. Furthermore the manager can’t even see a servers tips to pay out the credit card tips accurately from iPad until he or she has batched out at the end of the day. The only solution after two years of trying to remedy this situation for CajunKitchenCafe.com is to pull the report from a laptap on the backend after the point of sale has been batched at the end of the day or put the credit card tips on the employees paycheck which is a huge change to culture for most restaurants that have been in business for as long as Cajun Kitchen. Furthermore they have started to control the gateway options and give themselves additional transaction fees through Freedom Pay Gateway similar to how Micros and Aloha have been 20 years ago with Merchant Link. Just now Micros has endorced a direct driver without transaction fees and now revel wants to GoBackToTheFuture and pull this shady practice back to 2017.
This review looks like it was written by Revel and cut and paste into the review…hardly unbiased.
Revel has cost us more time, money, and headaches than I can fit on this comment page. They have treated us like their beta testers from day 1 and choose to make changes to our backend and their system without backing up our data, without notifying us, and without providing proper support. Getting through to a support person that has any semblance of knowledge takes multiple calls and escalations, and even then, half the time they seem to be guessing. Lately their response to us has been to suggest we invest an additional $2,000 in network upgrades because what we have is apparently obsolete, even though it was specified by them 18 months ago when we purchased the system.
I’m now looking for an alternative iPad based platform so that at least we can salvage the massive investment in hardware we had to make to implement Revel.
It looks nice and shiny until you have to start really using it in a high transaction environment.
Unfortunately I cannot recommend this POS.
i have been relatively pleased with my experience using revel. i have been a customer for the last few years. i have to say they really have improved their table service in the last upgrade, and thank god the upgrades are coming from the apple store now so it is no longer a time consuming nightmare.
STAY AWAY!!!! You have been warned. I signed up for service about 2 months ago and ordered the hardware the stands and credit card readers only as I had everything else. While everything was shipping in I started configuring the Menu and ran into some problems. I contacted support and a ticket was opened to have a special department look at it. 2 days passes and still no support. I contact them again and explain this is urgent and we need to setup ASAP and again they say they will mark the case as urgent and will get back to me soon. 3 more days passes still no response. The hardware already shipped in. I contact them on the 5th day very upset and express my frustration asking to please speak with the manager! I was informed a supervisor was not available and he will make sure to leave a note for him. Again 3 days pass and still NO FREAKING RESPONSE!!!! I contact them again and explain 8 days has passed and I am not receiving any support. At that point I was begging to think that I made a huge mistake going with this company I just imagined what would happen if we would be in full operation and receiving such bad support!!! Well another 5 days pass till finally the person from the so called special department calls at 7am and leaves voice mail leaving absolutely no contact information just a simple message that he received a note to call me!!! I honestly couldn’t believe this I still have the voicemail saved. He also send me a email “Let me know if you need help with anything” I reply to him that our restaurant is opened from 10AM and to call me from 10AM till 10PM and he again calls me at 8am and does not even leave a voicemail. I immediately called customer service and told them to turn off the service and I wanted to return the equipment! As soon as I said that everybody started calling me from every department even from corporate because I was still within the time frame to return. I did not fall for their tricks this time and told them I want to cancel and politely asked to not charge a restocking fees. Revel still wants to hold me accountable to restocking fees after all have said and shown to them. To anybody that wants a good POS system please stay FAR AWAY FROM REVEL. This is a evil and greedy company! They are only here to make money and not to help their customers solve problems and create POS solutions. Please take my word and stay far away!!! You will REGRET IT BIG TIME if you decide to go with this system.
This is hands down the worse choice, DO NOT BUY!!!!. Their customer service is awful. We have lost payments, the system continually goes down, their tech team is clueless and mostly based in India. We have had the system for a year and over 200 support tickets, that’s almost 1/day.
DO NOT BUY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi guys!
Can you tell me please how put Revel POS software on my POS hardware?
I have found the support quite friendly and pleasant to deal with, I really enjoy the cloud based product list so that i can out source my data entry (together with qb online integration) , it is not a small investment, but if have enough sales I find it well worth my investment. I think the program is more for bar/restaurant at the moment, i bought revel because it came with a scale and I can weigh at the POS .my biggest problem at the moment is that it sends all the credit card payments individual and sums up all my check payments during the financial exchange, so now i need the select each visa payment to balance out the deposit from my credit card machine, and deposit the total number of checks in my cash account so that i can make individual checks to post on my deposit slip.
i would give it 3/5 stars now, 4/5 if i can have the checks come separate to qb and 5/5 if it can do charge accounts/invoicing with qb.
Have had Revel POS at 2 locations for over a year. There are some good ideas and some improvements. However, today, Friday night, they broke the POS at both locations and require an upgrade to new POS. Got emailed instructions to upgrade. OK. the instructions state I need to get a provisioning PIN from their support. I hope these folks work 24×7 as right now, I have 2 locations shut down on a weekend. This is the type of juvenile mistake that Revel could avoid with mature tech support/engineering management. E.g. send info ahead of time that an upgrade is REQUIRED and then wait until the customer DOES the upgrade before deleting existing functionality. But Revel uses a lot of off-shore IT so it doesn’t have tight controls. Totally avoidable problems. I believe all their POS customers who hadn’t upgraded were affected today. We do POS upgrades when alerted they are ready – but Revel is poor at customer communication in general.
I have yet to see a positive review of Revel anywhere but on their own site. That really tells you something.
Currently using i ehopper free POS software with a feature set that rivals expensive systems. Price is crucial for small and only opened small business. It makes no sense to invest money in expensive software. What is covered: inventory, orders management, payments split, tips management, simple & understandable reporting. Hardware is optional. 24×7 technical support. So far I’m satisfied.
We’re sorry to hear you experienced difficulty installing our system. We appreciate your feedback, Steven.
We are truly sorry to hear that you’ve had a negative experience with Revel Systems. We appreciate your feedback.
Worst experience with a supplier since my opening!
I saw the all the bad reviews about the support before signing up but my Sales represent based in UK told me that I will have a UK support and it will be very different. And as an IT, I told myself that I will succeed to setup the POS by myself with the documentation.
You can
This system is a joke. Seems really good on paper, then when you order it, they send it without instructions. They wanted me to spend another couple of thousand to fly somebody up to help me set it up. We spent hours on the phone with tech support without any resolution of our set up issues. Tried to return it and they said “We don’t do returns.”
Don’t buy. Get something else. Horrible and very expensive mistake.
faulty payments structure: we lost all the money from credit card transactions on day 1 of the business !!! By far, the worst customer service that one can ever experience. So every single person who reviewed them negatively, were so right. I am really surprised by the way this entire situation was handled. Firstly, nowhere in the training did anyone ever mention the 2 buttons and the purpose of credit and credit plus. Secondly there should have been some sort of pop up or error message saying the transaction didn
Revel is definitely not a system to be used by high volume retailers. After several weeks of attempting to load a large product list, I had to give up due to the horrendous customer support. When I asked for a refund, I was told I was outside the 30 day refund window, even after pointing out this was caused be the lack of support from Revel. Only after posting my difficulties in several review forums, was I offered a refund for the software only. That would still leave me with over $4k in useless hardware. Don’t fall for the hype. Read the many reviews, and run away fast.