Marg Aloha POS

It is a step up from a cash register but it is extremely overpriced, unstable and not user friendly.

The system would crash at least once a day for the three years I used it in my restaurants. Expensive and slow service to repair the issues would have the restaurant down. The technicians would force you to use their hardware so they could overcharge you for printers and other periphals. The database was held in disjointed daily reports rather one large database that you could use OLAP to provide Excel pivot tables against. Instead I had to export every days report in a flat file to an Access database to have true reporting, or, recurring theme here, pay outrageous fees to Aloha for basic reports.

http://www.businessoftware.com/ will save you thousands of dollars over the years and provide greater reporting abilities all while appearing exactly the same as Aloha interface to front of house staff.

I am running restaurant point of sales systems. By switching from Aloha to BSS Restaurant POS I have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and have had a much more stable point of sale system that accepts any swap out of hardware and continues to run. Support is $30 a month and excellent compared to Aloha which ran in the thousands of dollars and was poor. http://www.businessoftware.com/

I had to think really hard about this one and I came up with nothing

I don't even know where to start. We are using few of Aloha's services, such as loyalty, online ordering, and POS. First of all, each one of these pieces of software has a completely different logic and interface, which makes it a challenge to manage. We've had all kinds of issues especially with loyalty and online ordering, starting from implantation time taking double or triple the maximum promised. On the loyalty side, we've had issues with basic things from online sign-up logic for guests to the way the system handles loyalty plans for multiple locations that do not have the exact same item numbers for each item on the menu. Here I should give credit to the loyalty team that handles the online signup process who actually listened to my suggestions, agreed that there is a better way to handle the signup process and implemented the changes significantly quick. So, good job on that! Now, back to online ordering. I can talk about that for a while. First, implementation took about three times longer than the period promised. Then, I encountered a problem on the first day of testing where if a guest places more than one order for the same date and time, each one of which they received confirmation for, the store receives all those orders at the back of the house server, but only one of all the orders makes it to the POS and therefore, the kitchen. In a case like this, the employees at the store realize that there is more than one order at the moment the guest comes in to pick up their orders. I suppose anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant can understand how embarrassing that is. Well, guess how long it took for that problem to get fixed - about 15 months.

Ther are so many options out there today of companies that are much more flexible and have a constant progress towards improving their customers' experience. If I had to chose a POS for a new store that does not need to be linked to our franchise it will be anything else but Aloha.

We don't have to use pen and paper.

Aloha has been awful for my business, and I believe the root source is NCR. The only thing that I like about it is that I have some familiarity with the system. Besides that, we keep encountering new problems with the software and the hardware. I've had 2 of my 6 brand new terminals replaced after they went bad and corrupted my whole system. It has not been good for business what so ever.

I can't stand NCR. Their customer service is dreadful. All service calls that I make during the operating hours of my restaurant are all outsourced over seas and it is very frustrating trying to work with them. The local office never follows up on any service calls that we submit.

All service calls are handled very poorly, and the local office has proven to be difficult for me and my management team to work with.

Aloha has created more problems than it's solved. We are still having a hard time with programming months after we have opened. There seems to be a problem with NCR techs loading old backup points which erases all the programming that we are doing.

Front-of-the-house software is easy to learn and train new staff.

All of the add ons for extremely expensive and antiquated. Website interaction with online ordering (menus and gift cards are not easy to work with.

Not worth the money!!!

At the end of the day, there are to many upcoming, tech driven POS systems at a fraction of the cost. Aloha/NCR service does not meet the high price tag.

I didn't have much of a choice because the system was chosen before I was hired at the location.

It was chosen because it was the standard at he time. It's dated now and needs to be replaced.

Dated user interface. Tedious report making process with too many limitations for customization. Lack of features like suggestive sales, customer information gathering for integrate with marketing, expensive. Close out makes a use separate the card types (extra step then enter Tips in an inefficient way.

Do your homework and spend your money on something more current.

Point of sale.