Software updates

With many traditional onsite systems you pay for your software up front along with your hardware. While this may (and should) reduce any ongoing fees, it will usually also mean you do not benefit from any significant software updates or improvements.

To update your software you are likely to need to pay for an upgrade, which may also lead to costs to upgrade your hardware.

With a cloud epos system, you will usually pay for your software as a service. This means you will always have access to the latest software available from your provider without having to pay to upgrade software or hardware.

With the pace of change of technology today, a static system can become out of date very quickly.

Cost of switching

One of the big benefits of a cloud EPOS is it is very easy and inexpensive to switch to a different EPOS provider if your system doesn’t live up to your expectations. Most cloud EPOS systems make use of off-the-shelf hardware that can be re-used with a different epos system should you decide to switch. As the software is usually paid for monthly, you can simply stop paying the old provider and start paying the new.

With onsite server epos systems the costs to switch can be very high. We speak to many publicans who have paid a large up front fee for a new pub EPOS system, only to find it doesn’t live up to their expectations. Unfortunately, these systems can often be very hard to resell and so the cost incurred is frequently unrecoverable.

A hybrid approach

In our experience most sites run perfectly well via the cloud. Internet outages these days are very rare and offline mode keeps things going if outages do occur.

There are some sites though that do have unreliable Internet and would benefit from having a server onsite.

For BarTab EPOS we do offer a local server option so that sites that can’t rely on their Internet connection can still take advantage of many of the other benefits of a modern cloud EPOS system.