CAKE POS Reviews

Summary: Again, the people in customer service/support are top notch. Everything goes downhill significantly from there. I really want to support and believe in this company but can no longer wait to do so. Far too many issues, far too many broken promises, far to many costs I cannot afford to keep getting hit with. Buyer beware.

Positive: As an executive chef and business owner of 40 years, spanning a bit over 300 restaurants, I've seen a few things. And while I really have tried and wanted to trust Cake, here are my fair experiences with them.

My take on Cake pros... Very easy to use and set up, enough so that most beginners can do so with little hand holding from customer support. That said, the support is outstanding on the first level. People that genuinely care, most have backgrounds in the industry, and take the time to understand your needs.

For most establishments the reports, tracking, back of the house and front of house admin are sufficient to a mid-level establishment.

Negative: Costs are not transparent, and once you break it all down, can be rather expensive. My costs have run into the 75th percentile of all systems out there. This places them in the price range of the big players out there. Problem is, while their features and product is great for beginner to mid-level, it lacks compared to the big boys on the market.

Online ordering has several known issues, some of which I've waited a couple years now to see fixes and progress, with no real answer in sight. The worst of the online issues... what your server has access to on a handheld or in selecting modifiers, etc... the guest can manipulate online as well. Without going into a ton of detail, a perfect example would be an entree that has a side option modifier. Depending on the entree, our guests can order 2 or more sides (for no extra charge) when they are only suppose to select one.

The Offline mode? We've experienced multiple failures and multiple lost checks... some as high as $500 in a single instance. Doesn't take too many of these to really add up, and not what any business order wants to see.

Handhelds go through stages and routinely glitch. Splitting checks on a handheld can be an adventure when glitching, and lost checks have happened here as well.

Customer support... as good as the front of the line is, as soon as they say something is being elevated to the next tier, or to IT, I sigh. Service drops significantly with promised answers and call backs never happening as they should. As I mentioned, years waiting for specific issues to be addressed that have still not been fixed.

Accounting and reporting structures. Some of their ways of doing things just don't make sence. For instance, gift cards. We had an issue where a card would be swiped, and suddenly twice the amount would be deducted off the card. Then suddenly, it would be random amounts. When I went to go back and look at logs and dissect where and why, logs are lacking detail and you would have to go back to the very beginning of the card's activation (for us some of these are going on 3 years) then search through thousands of transactions to match the card number, then calculate the balance the old-fashioned way. When I asked for some sort of log or their record keeping, I got nothing. I've now spent time tracing back 5 cards, all of which have incorrect balances at this point. I have hundreds to go and am not liking where the outcome seems to be trending.

I've now had to threaten legal action and demand accountability. Through these problems, I've lost money on lost checks, incorrect charges, gift card inconsistencies that have cost both $ and guest's trust...