Small and medium retailers, coffee shops, restaurants and similar businesses will be able to devote more time to customers if a new online electronic point of sale app gets widespread use.

Payments processor Elavon has introduced an ePOS platform that will work across several devices, bringing point of sale capability to tablets, and it’s already finding favour with Irish firms.

Payments technology is constantly evolving, as card payment transactions have grown by 24% over the last five years. Contactless payments are also on the increase following the limit increase to €30 in November 2015.

In the retail sector, the trend is towards integrated ePOS systems that handle payments and link into inventory management. Jam Art Factory is a gallery and design shop with two outlets in Dublin, established by Mark and John Haybyrne in 2011. The venture majors on Irish art and design, and the retailer use talech for payments.

Designed For iPads

In Association with

Talech was founded in 2014 in Palo Alto, California. Its cloud point of sale solution is aimed at small and medium sized retailers, coffee shops and restaurants. The platform is designed for iPads and central to the design are large, colour-coded buttons which make navigation easy and decrease time spent training new employees on the system.

Because it’s online, merchants can access their sales, inventory, employee and customer data from any computer or iPad. The software can also generate reports for export to Excel. Merchants can also print receipts or orders to multiple printers.

Inventory tracking enables merchants to manage stock in real-time. Items can be quickly added and prices and quantities edited in the interface. The platform also has employee tracking tools, such as timesheets, and different levels of access privileges can be set.

Before they adopted talech, Jam Art Factory’s reconciliation was manual and time-consuming. Now stock is uploaded to the system and with a few taps the owners can see sales by artist at any given time.

Mark Haybyrne commented: “The system has changed what we do at the back end of our business, especially how we pay artists and designers. Before this we were paying manually, using page after page of receipt books. And because we can access talech in the cloud, we can focus on customers during the day rather than trying to figure out the books.”