Industries · Hospitality
IT for restaurants, pubs and hotels, where the busy hour is the whole business.
Point of sale, guest Wi-Fi, card handling and back office, set up so that a Friday night stays a Friday night. For venues across Greater Victoria.
The service this prevents
Twenty to seven on a Friday. The tills stop. The room is full.
There is a queue at the door, forty covers seated, and nobody can take a payment. Staff start writing on pads. Somebody is on hold with the point of sale company, who are in another time zone. The manager is trying to remember whether the internet router lives in the cupboard or above the walk-in.
Nothing about that evening is recoverable. The covers you lose are gone, the reviews get written that night, and the staff remember it for months.
What we hear from venues
The things that come up in the first conversation.
- The point of sale goes down in service and there is no fallback at all
- Guest Wi-Fi runs on the same network as the tills
- Nobody has explained what card handling actually obliges you to do
- Whoever installed the POS three years ago is the closest thing to IT support
- Turnover is high and old staff accounts are still active
- Bookings, POS, payroll and accounting do not talk to each other
- Only the manager can get into the back office, and they are away
- Seasonal hiring means onboarding ten people in a week, twice a year
What we do about it
Built around service, not office hours.
A fallback for the busy hour
- Backup internet that switches over on its own
- Payment that keeps working when the main line does not
- A written plan the duty manager can follow without calling anyone
Guests nowhere near the tills
- Guest Wi-Fi properly separated from payment systems
- Coverage that reaches the patio and the back of house
- Guests cannot see each other’s devices, or yours
Card handling that holds up
- Payment set up to a standard that will pass scrutiny
- Plain explanation of what you are actually responsible for
- Evidence kept, so the annual questionnaire is not a scramble
Staff turnover handled
- Ten new starters set up in an afternoon, not a week
- Leavers closed out the same day, every time
- No shared logins that nobody can change when someone goes
Back office that is not one person
- More than one person able to get in when it matters
- Access by role, so a supervisor is not locked out at 7pm
- Nothing depending on a password in somebody’s head
Hardware that survives a kitchen
- Equipment chosen for heat, grease and being dropped
- Spares where a failure would stop service
- Replacement planned around your quiet season
After hours
Yes, we cover evenings and weekends. Here is exactly what that means.
24/7 support is available on fully managed IT. It is not sold as a standalone add-on, because covering a night on systems we do not otherwise look after is not support, it is guesswork at your expense.
The scope is what we manage. Your network, your connectivity, your devices, your Microsoft environment and your phones are covered. Your point of sale vendor’s own software stays with them, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we will do at seven on a Friday is work out quickly which of those it actually is, so you are not the one stuck between two companies during service.
The design still matters more than the phone number. A venue with tested failover and separated networks usually does not need the call at all, which is the version everybody prefers.
- 24/7 available on fully managed IT
- Covers the platforms and products we manage
- POS vendor software stays with the vendor
- We work out which it is, fast
- And design it out wherever we can
Questions from venues
What operators ask us first.
Do you support our point of sale system?
We support everything around it, which is usually where the problem actually is: the internet, the network, the payment terminals and the devices. Your POS vendor supports their own software. We are the ones who work out which of those it is, rather than leaving you to referee between two companies mid-service.
Is guest Wi-Fi really a risk?
On the same network as your tills, yes, genuinely. It is also one of the easier things to fix properly, usually without new hardware. It is normally the first thing we look at in a venue.
What happens if the internet goes down mid-service?
With a second connection in place it switches over and most staff never notice. Without one, you are taking cash and writing on pads. Which of those you get is decided months earlier, not on the night.
We are a single small restaurant. Is this overkill?
The security side, no. A small venue takes cards the same way a large one does and carries the same obligations. The rest we scale down honestly, and we will tell you which parts you can skip.
Our staff share a login. Is that a problem?
It is, and everybody does it because it is faster at the counter. There are ways to make individual logins fast enough that staff stop working around them, which is the only version of this that actually sticks.
Can we get help at nine on a Saturday?
On fully managed IT, yes. Coverage runs 24/7 across the platforms and products we manage. It is part of that relationship rather than something bought separately, because after-hours cover on systems nobody has been maintaining is not worth paying for.
Can you work around our season?
Yes, and we plan for it. Nothing gets changed in July if it can be done in February, and hiring surges are something we set up for in advance rather than react to.
Where to start
What matters most for a venue.
Other industries
We work the same way everywhere else.
The obligations change, the approach does not. If your sector is not listed, it is almost certainly still a fit.
Let’s look at what happens when the tills stop.
Half an hour, no charge, no salesperson. Preferably not during service.
Would rather write?
Send this and we will reply, usually the same business day. No call unless you want one.
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