Point of Sale Review – Toast

   / — Android point of sale, tablet based point of sale

History

Toast Point of Sale is a mobile point of sale platform based off of the android platform.  Toast was founded on December 22, 2011 and to date they’ve raised just over 30 million dollars in venture capital, most recently from Google Ventures.  Toast POS is an exciting alternative to the iOS tablet based point of sale systems.  Toast POS is based in Boston Toast and is used primarily for restaurants, cafes, bars, nightclubs.
Demo Videos:
Mobile Order Taker:


POS Network Architecture:

Toast Point of Sale uses the Android platform,  with hardware devises not being locked down in the same way as iOS there could be potential security pitfalls of basing a point of sale system on Android.  However time will tell what is truly the most stable and secure platform over time.  The use a hardwired lan connection for all full terminals.  This creates a local area networking that helps facilitate communication between the tablets and the different hardware add ons.

Toast POS primarily uses Cisco Meraki routers and access points of the wireless communication.

POS Software – Management Console

Toast POS has what you would expect from a cloud based tablet solution.  You have the ability to remotely see reports and check in on your restaurant to see up to date labor reports and sales figures.

Hardware:

Like most tablet based point of sale systems, Toast uses industry standard hardware, like Epson printers and honeywell barcode scanners. A full list of compatible hardware can be found on the toast POS website:

https://pos.toasttab.com/android-pos/all-pos-hardware

Payment Processing:

There is currently only one option for payment processing and this requires that you use Toast as a payment processor.  This is a huge negative for the system because it can add significant cost to the system over time.  While the initial investment for this tablet based devise is somewhat lower because of the fact that it is based on Android and not iOS it will be far more costly in the long run because you will be locked into a high and non competitive processing rate.  This is very similar to how many other Point of Sale company’s make money.  It’s important to investigate and take into consideration what processor you will need to use with your point of sale system.

Customer Service & Support:

We believe toast has anywhere from 1000 to 3000 clients currently.  This is certainly not a very large user pool to work with and from what we have heard from existing Toast Clients and post Aloha/Micros users is that the system is good in theory but not yet ready to run a high volume, high transaction nightclub, restaurant, or bar.  And this makes sense because Toast is a fairly new to the scene company in the POS world.  The majority of online reviews we found online were mostly positive but we did not find a large amount of them.  It will be interesting to see how this company develops as they use the newly minted 30 million from Google ventures that was closed recently to scale up their sales, operations, and product development.  As with any start up this kind of capital injection is bound to create growing pains if not managed properly.

Pricing & Contract:

The most common pricing structure for Toast POS starts at 100/month, each additional devise is priced at 50/month. Enterprise accounts require a custom quote to get specific pricing. More details on their specifics can be found on the toast website:

https://pos.toasttab.com/pricing

Web Resources:

Toast POS Website – https://pos.toasttab.com/

Crunch Base Profile – https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/toast#/entity

Leave a Review:

What was your experience with Toast Point of Sale?  Please leave your review on our site to provide our users with your experiences.