Feature: the perfect payment terminal

Card machines. PQDs. Payment terminals.

Call them what you will. These machines are the lifeline of every hospitality business. Whether you sell bitter-sweet cocktails, Neapolitan pizza, or breathtakingly crafted sushi, you will need to charge your customers — and your customers will want to pay for your hard work.

One of the most important parts of sustainably running a business, generating revenue, is also the part you never want to talk about. Both you and your customers want to get the “ugly” part of the experience done as quickly as possible, and without any over- or under-payments. Having to charge a customer twice, or refund them, is not good.

We heard time and again from our customers — often as passing comments — that they were fed up with stacks of card payment slips at close, missing payments, and payments that just did not match up. Many of the team at ORDR, having worked in hospitality ourselves, agreed. It is accounting chaos.

Ninja mode

In ninja mode, as a special side project in the engineering team, we spoke to numerous payment companies to see if we could solve all of the above. After many meetings with gateways and acquirers, we whittled it down to a solution that was, without exaggeration, perfect.

First and most important: it needs to be quick. Speed is everything in hospitality — front of house, prep, operations.

Second: it needs to reconcile each payment to a given bill, automatically.

Third: it needs to be flexible enough to deal with any situation. Humans are unpredictable.

Thus, our cloud-connected Payment Terminal was born.

After connecting it to your Wi-Fi, it can speak with any waiter logged in to the Staff interface. The battery lasts well beyond a full service, even with frequent usage, and the buttons and touchscreen are quick and accurate.

We integrated the Payment Terminal directly into the Staff interface to accomplish — and exceed — all three requirements. We are all chuffed with the result.

Carlos, co-founder.

Image: a ninja using a credit card to pay on a card payment machine in pixel art style.