Your EPOS Supplier Blames the Network. Your IT Firm Blames the Till.

The argument, as it usually goes

A bar in Manchester rings us on a Monday. Saturday night the tills kept dropping out. Not all the time, just when it was busy, which is of course the only time that matters. The bar manager phoned the EPOS supplier's helpline. The helpline looked at their dashboard, saw the tills going offline and coming back, and said, reasonably enough from where they sat, "that is your network, you need to speak to your IT company".

So the bar manager phoned the IT company. The IT company connected remotely, saw the router up, the broadband up, the switch lights on, and said, also reasonably, "the network is fine, it must be the tills, speak to your EPOS supplier".

Two phone calls, two honest answers, no fix. And next Saturday it will happen again.

We have heard this story more times than any other in ten years. It is not that either supplier is lying or lazy. It is that the fault lives in the gap between them, and neither one is paid to stand in the gap.

Why both of them are right

The EPOS supplier is right that the tills are going offline because they cannot reach the internet or the back-office server reliably. The software is doing exactly what it was built to do when the connection wobbles.

The IT company is right that the router and the broadband are up. They usually are. The fault is not "the network is down". The fault is "the network is not good enough under load for a device that cannot tolerate any interruption", which is a different thing, and it is invisible from the router's status page.

Here is what is usually going on underneath:

• The tills, the card terminals, the kitchen printer, the handhelds, the guest Wi-Fi and the manager's laptop are all on one flat network, through one unmanaged switch and one or two access points put up wherever there was a socket.
• When the room fills up, sixty phones join the guest Wi-Fi and start streaming. The access point the till handheld uses is now also serving those phones. The handheld drops, reconnects, drops.
• Nobody has told the switch that till traffic matters more than Instagram, because an unmanaged switch cannot be told anything.
• The kitchen printer is on Wi-Fi because running a cable was "too much hassle" on install day, so tickets go missing exactly when the kitchen is busiest.

None of that shows up as "down". All of it shows up as "the tills keep dropping out on Saturday".

The boundary problem

Look at who is responsible for what in a typical venue:

Four or five suppliers, and the two things that most often cause the Saturday-night problem, the switch and the access points, have no owner at all. When the fault is in the unowned middle, every supplier can truthfully say it is not theirs.

This is not a hospitality-only problem. We see exactly the same shape in retail, with the EPOS supplier, the card provider and an IT company who only looks after the office PCs upstairs.

How to settle it in ten minutes

If you are stuck between two suppliers right now, these questions usually find the fault before either of them does:

1. Does the till fault happen when the venue is quiet, or only when it is busy? Busy-only means load, which means network design, not the till.
2. Does it happen on every till, or on one? One till points at that device, its cable or the port it is plugged into. Every till points at the switch, the router or the line.
3. Is the failing device on Wi-Fi or on a cable? Handhelds, tablets and kitchen printers on Wi-Fi are the usual suspects. Plug a failing till into the router with a cable for a service and see if it behaves.
4. Is the guest Wi-Fi on the same network as the tills? If the answer is "I think so" or "what do you mean", it is, and that is your problem.
5. When did it start? "When we got busier", "when we added the handhelds", "when the new menu launched with photos on the guest Wi-Fi splash page" are all network answers.

What actually fixes it

The fix is almost never a new till system, which is what you will be sold if you ask the EPOS supplier, and it is almost never a faster broadband line, which is what you will be sold if you ask the broadband provider. It is the unglamorous middle:

• A managed switch, so till traffic can be prioritised and the guest network can be kept apart. This is the single biggest fix and the smallest job on this list.
• Guest Wi-Fi on its own network with its own limits, so sixty phones streaming cannot touch the till.
• Access points placed by survey rather than by socket, so the handhelds have coverage in the places staff actually stand.
• The kitchen printer and every fixed till on a cable, not Wi-Fi. If the cable was "too much hassle" on install day, it is less hassle than a Saturday without tickets.
• Card terminals paired to the till over the local network, with failover on the router, so a line wobble does not become a cash-only evening.

We wrote about the failover half of that in why your card machine stops when the broadband drops. The network half is what our network infrastructure page covers.

The real fix is one phone number

The technical fix is straightforward. The structural fix matters more, and it is this: someone has to own the whole chain, from the card terminal to the broadband line, so that "it's your network" and "it's your till" are the same phone call.

That is why we install tills, the cabling, the switches, the Wi-Fi and the router as one job, and support them under one contract. When a Liverpool restaurant's tills went down during a lunch service, we were there in half an hour and the fault was a failing switch in the back office, not the tills and not the broadband; nobody had to argue about whose it was because all of it was ours. The story is in our Liverpool restaurant case study.

If you already have a till system you are happy with, that does not change. We will document the network it sits on, put the tills and card terminals on a segmented, prioritised network, and support the whole thing. The EPOS supplier still supports their software, and when the fault is inside it, we ring them, not you.

The test of whether your current arrangement is sound is simple. When the tills drop out on Saturday, how many phone calls does it take before someone turns up? If the answer is more than one, you have a boundary problem, not a till problem.