Revel SystemsReviews of revelsystems.com

We have used Revel for close to one year. Any issue that needed addressing was addressed timely and completely. The customer service staff calls when they say they will and follows the issue thru to resolution.

We use Revel for our collegiate concession business which is merchandise. Our customers demand a quick check-out and Revel has delivered. At our last football game, Revel did close to 1400 transaction during a five hour period. It has been simple for our staff to use and the wireless feature really works for us. We are very happy!

This system fits all my company needs

Finally someone that understands restaurants! Well thought out in every way. The installation was very well planned and therefore went smoothly - operation is intuitive so training was minimal - the backend is robust and fully customizable and the support is FAST and very knowledgeable. 10 Stars!

Customer service is timely and not bogged down with excessive procedure. Everyone seems to care about a solution and not just a closed ticket.

We have now been live with our new Revel POS for a week. Naturally, there were a few issues during the switch over, but most of those were a) problems with my setup and b) easily corrected with help from the on-boarding team, tech support folks and very comprehensive online documentation. As of this writing, I believe we are finally “there.” I am really liking Revel’s product. To be honest, I had no idea how much I was missing out on these past 4 years. I had just assumed that a mature and viable POS product did not exist in the iPad/Cloud arena. I assumed, incorrectly it would seem, that to get such a product I would have to one day shell out thousands or tens of thouands of dollars for one of the “big guys” with expensive hardware. I’m glad to have been proven incorrect in that assumption. In my mind, one of the absolute best features of Revel is that it is so highly configurable. I have been able to create a POS that meets my business needs as well as the needs of my employees and guests. So far I have not had to “settle” for a configuration that works for “most” people. Instead I have found that I can tell Revel how I want it to work for me and it just works that way. I've never understood why most cloud-based POS companies think that they know more about running our businesses than those of us who are in the trenches. I have been delighted to realize that Revel is willing to put in the effort to create a POS that works they way we work. There is no one-size-fits-all, especially in restaurants. Revel's designers and engineers seem to understand that fact. Little things like the following mean the world to me: 1) I can specify negative modifiers — ones that deduct from the price. Now my guests can truly have it their way and only pay for what they want. While I've always run my cafe that way, only Revel has allowed me to do that without a lot of unnecessary steps. 2) I can set up default modifiers, and more importantly when a guest doesn’t want that default it is easy to specify at the POS and it is obvious for the kitchen. 3) The flexibility of defining “one size fits all” modifier groups, and tailoring those to the needs of each product that uses them, has made my life so much easier. The modifier features are amazing, and I've just begun to scratch the surface of what is available. 4) And don’t even get me started on recipes. How I ever lived without those in my POS is a mystery. I guess I lived without them because I never knew I needed them! In the past two days, my employees and I have been able to identify menu items whose gross margins are dragging us down. Since all of our products come with so many options, this has always been a hard, time-consuming thing to do, involving lots of spreadsheets and number crunching. Now that I have nearly all of my recipes defined, I’m able to run one Product Mix report whenever I want and identify problems before they become catastrophes. That alone makes the “extra” expense of the monthly Revel hosting fee worth it. Even in a small shop, such as mine, inventory control is a nightmare. It has become very obvious to me that after a month or two this task will get much easier. Once I have finished tweaking my product and recipe definitions, I’m looking forward to “knowing” my inventory status with just the touch of a button. I know it won’t be completely accurate — no theoretical inventory system can possibly account for human error. But, I already can tell that it will be much more accurate than I’ve ever had before, and it will be more accurate without the drudgery of weekly physical inventories. I would be remiss if I did not give a shout-out to your on-boarding and tech support people. They all proved to be very helpful, and very willing to let me go at my pace in this process. I am a tech geek from the days of Univac and IBM mainframes, punch cards and programming languages that are long dead and buried. Though I am now a chef I have never lost my love of all things tech. It was a pleasure to work with people who let me control the process as I was learning Revel. Their on-boarding team is willing to do as much, or as little, as their new clients need to get them up and running quickly. If I had to sum up my early experiences with Revel and the switch over, that sentence would be ---- I now feel like I am more in control of my business, that I understand my business better. As we enter our fifth year, a year that looks to be like it will be on schedule to be our first true profit year, that is huge. I'm looking forward to learning how Revel can help make that first profit year even more profitable. Sure, there is always room for improvement. Revel, like most mPOS companies, needs to get their integrated EMV/contactless functionality up and running, not just for one or two payment processing companies, but for all of them. Having said that, I realize how expensive and how difficult that task is. But, if they get it done quickly and correctly, they will be a hard company to beat. A few other reviewers mentioned one suggestion I will echo -- be prepared to spend some time learning what you have with Revel, and what it can do for you. Myself, I spent hours looking at every setting, reading the help bubbles for every setting, and making notes about what I did and did not want to implement. I asked a lot of questions. I watched a lot of videos. When I wasn't sure, I created tests, ran them and looked at the results. Most importantly, I spent two days keying the same orders into both my current POS and Revel, looking for discrepancies and errors in my setup. Sure, that all took a lot of time. But taking a lot of time up front means spending less time fighting fires after going live. What I'm trying to say is don't think you are going to get your hardware and go live in a week. I budgeted a month for training, setup and troubleshooting before I ever thought about going live. I think a month is the MINIMUM time needed in order to do it right, and I have set up a lot of POS systems in my career. Remember -- as restaurants, our POS is the hub of our data and data analysis. We wouldn't short-change our recipe development, or training our cooks and other staff. To succeed, we need great data that tells us everything we need to know about our business. Revel can be that vital hub, but only if we take the necessary time and effort in the beginning. And, with that, I'll step down from my soapbox.

I've been using Revel for about a month and am pretty happy with it. Just wanted to write a positive comment for other people to read. Had an enterprise system before Revel, so moving to iPads was a big step. The Sales Team did a good job of explaining things, answering my questions, and setting up conferences to discuss and sample the system. Installation was really easy. It took a day to set up all the hardware, but it was pretty straightforward. I was able to get the relevant inventory/data from my old system formatted in a way to import it in to Revel. There were a few hurdles uploading the inventory, but the Revel Support and Onboarding teams were up to the task. From the day I signed the contract with Revel to using Revel live in my business was a tad over two weeks. Now that we've been live for the last few weeks, there have been some minor hiccups or snags, but the Support Team has been able to help me fix the problem in reasonable times - usually in less than a day . I really have confidence that if something further goes amiss, I'll be able to get it fixed without extended down time. My older employees who don't use a tablet in their everyday lives are having some problems adjusting to the system, but I think those employees will have trouble with any change. The employees who have used iPads/tablets in their own lives, love the new system and didn't even have to watch the training videos to get proficient. I was really scared going into the process of finding a new POS system, but after a few weeks, I'm glad I did it. My life has become easier and Revel has so many features that I won't even use, but is nice to know they are available. No POS system is perfect unless you totally customize it to the way you want it which probably means having your own in house programming, but Revel is plenty good. It does take some time to keep refining the system to get it to do what you want (and I’m still not totally there yet), but that would be true for any POS system. The key is Revel Support is there to help you get where you need to go.

The bottom line is that it takes time to learn this system and you MUST be somewhat computer savvy. I spent several months learning and training myself and my employees before we went “live” with it. I couldn’t even tell you how many hundreds of hours I have spent in the backend, front-end, reading the manual, watching the videos, and just experimenting with the system overall. The person below who left a review expected the system to work on opening day without any training or learning curve isn’t being realistic.