Revel SystemsReviews of revelsystems.com

Revel POS has been a constant disappointment since we had the system installed about 2 months ago. Poorly designed, untrained customer support and frequent technical issues have created an added headache during a restaurant opening. What once may have been a competitive product has been left in the dust by the likes of Breadcrumb and Toast. WARNING! Look elsewhere for your ipad based POS.

My name is James Dorr, and I own and operate OnSite Computer Services in Plymouth New Hampshire. I have well over 30 years of IT and networking experience and I have worked on just about everything out there. A customer of mine purchased Revel about a year ago and it has been nothing but a problem for them. This spring the customer called me in because the Revel system was crashing continually during busy events. Initially what I found was that the systems reported that they were losing connectivity to the main system and it would display an error message in red at the bottom of the screen. Naturally, all tests on the system passed. Revel support was not helpful at all. At first I blamed the access points supplied by Revel. At this point, 3 out of the 5 that they supplied are dead. One I took out of service to test more powerful access points and another is about to be taken out. I replaced their access points with more powerful routers that act as access points. Still issues. I think the main issue with the system is the garbage database that it uses. It acts like an Access database that is very large. If communication is interrupted for a split second, the system crashes. This behavior is not seen in mature systems that use a real and powerful database system. The biggest issue with the system, besides the crashing, is the fact that there is no error reporting in the software at all. And not only that, but support can't nail down issues as evidenced by the comments on Revel's Facebook page. They assured me the issue was our network, so I completely rebuilt and rewired the Revel part of the network and it is still not working correctly. I've taken the time to rewire the customers Revel network, replaced access points, and I have spent countless hours and hundreds of emails with 'Tier 2' support only to have the system still in a barely functional state. After rebuilding, and consulting with support, we have a system with the exact same issues as when we started. From what I can see the system works great with few customers at the business, but once they get busy the system crashes and numbers don't add up at the end of the night. This is 2016 and there are mature systems that don't act like this. Revel is NOT mature, more like public beta that you have to pay for. The iPads are cute and everything, but the system is not ready for production. If anyone has had similar issues with Revel, I would like to hear from you. My customer has invested too much time and money into this system and they need it to work. I would like to receive PMs from other folks, let's band together and see what we can do. Thanks for reading.

Revel's sales team were very pushy and finally sold us the promise that their system would be English/ Chinese compatible. What they didn't reveal is that they had to program it to make this happen and instead of characters we had to input pictures. Unfortunately this wasn't compatible with the receipt printers. They tried to resolve and it would still print only half the characters. After we tried to CANCEL twice - in January 2016 and June 2016 we were still be charged monthly by them and their credit card processing company. This company promised something they couldn't do and continued to charge us even after several attempts to cancel.... Wasted so much time, money and energy with Revel.

Our daily sales reports change randomly, sometimes within minutes of printing out the previous report for no explainable reason. We have random sales appearing on our POS sales screen - sales that we did not enter. Customer support is difficult to understand, does not understand our process, repeatedly doesnt follow through with offers to call us back, and has even suggested we need to "Wait while we read the manual." We hope to transition away from this expensive and yet non-functional POS system as soon as possible.

Need better tech support issue take too long to get resolvedone

The Revel system itself functions great! Our project needed to integrate with their open API. We made our goals and needs for our resturant very clear from the beginning and were lead on by a particular member of the sales team. He lead us to believe through incorrect answers and continued reassurance that our specific API needs were achievable. What we found out after purchasing the system from a technical member of Revel is that not only could we not achieve what we needed but he would have never recommended Revel for these purposes to begin with. The sales member also withheld pricing and generally seemed unconcerned with our technical goals. On a positive note he was able to refund our entire purchase and even was able to give us a break on API pricing should we have stayed with Revel. (though to be fair, both Clover and Lightspeed offer 100% free open API's for their software). We have since moved to Lightspeed because their API offered more access to the POS system.

I switched POS system thinking that Revel was going to be an upgrade. The salesman was really good. Rewards and gift cards integration was my first reason but then the fact that they offer scheduling, CRM, online ordering and inventory control was close second. I cannot stressed how much I am disappointed. This is the worst decision I have ever made. Trust me I am not exaggerating. Everything from the menu building, the install, problem with synching, the reports, the errors, the CSM VIP that is just a joke, the tech support that cannot fix important problems and ask you to send an improvement request. An example; one of my many problem is that I cannot comply with an IRS request. Although I sent tech support the law to support my request, they still asked me to place an improvement request. They need another example; last Friday, I lost a payment because the online orders if paid at the time of pick up are not recorded properly. I have spent hours on the phone trying to get help. The ONLY reason I am still using the system is because I have customers setup on the rewards program and we are over $4000 in. If you can get a hold of anyone who cares, please tell them to give me a call. My cell number is in the system. I would be happy to explain everything that has been happening in details.

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’t. The documentation is not up to date, you have limited privilege on admin and the support UK or whatever is the most useless support I ever encounter. I have spent/wasted 20 days to try to setup the POS for nothing, spending hours with the ‘don’t care/don’t know support’. I just gave up at the end.