CAKE POS

Easy to use interface.
Order Pads should allow servers to spend more time on the floor
Inexpensive POS System.

It doesn't work when we need it to. We've been trying to get the issues resolved via Cake Support and Sysco Management for more than 8 months. It isn't getting any better. As soon as the dining room gets busy the Order Pad Apps crashes. All of our servers need to have paper and pencil ready at all times to complete their orders and stand in line at the terminal to enter them every rush. It seldom happens when we are slow. Orders get lost during entry causing double work to recover the in flight order, after printing in the kitchen causing them not to be charged on the customer's bill, and customer credit cards have been double billed as a result of Order Pad disconnects. We are spending hours with Cake Support that we should be spending working our business. We have to keep 1 person available to capture trouble shooting information for Cake Support during our rushes when (not if) the Order Pads go down. Cake Support is always busy, but will eventually call back. When they do, they aren't very knowledgeable with troubleshooting, they don't seem to be trained to go any deeper than the Cake University screens. The cheap price of the Cake system has become a huge expense in manpower and wasted time in our restaurant.

Our customers love their screen. They like that they can see their order. It's easy to read and understand. We love that we can use the system from home on the laptop and not just in the shop. I make changes to the menu mostly from home. I love having the itemized close cash receipt every day. I love all the reports that I get for tracking my business.

I don't like that all the buttons are the same color. It makes it very difficult to find buttons in a hurry when you have 40 different syrup flavors and 34 different teas. We need colored buttons that we can use as groups, for example, I could make all our sugar free syrups green and all the syrups that start with an A, blue, etc... It helps your eyes to find things quicker. It is really stressful for new employees to find buttons when training and the customer is standing there staring at you. It's better as a trained employee, but it would save us time at the machine when we could be making their order. Colored buttons are highly needed. Also, ever since the last software update that affected us directly, it is harder for me to add new products to the menu and put them in the right place. I can't put my finger on what changed, but i have trouble adding new products under existing categories. They come out as new buttons on the main screen. Not sure how to fix that.

When starting our coffee shop we knew we needed a POS. We did not know where to start. Once CAKE came to our attention is was hard to look anywhere else. The help from understand our need as newbie's to walking us through every step of set up was fantastic. What I like most about the software would take too many words.

There is not much I do not like about the CAKE software. If I had to choose a "least" favorite issue it would be that I wish the "Busy Hour" report was available on Universal Admin with a date range option. Also I wish Dashboard had a changeable date range option.