Square for coffee shops and cafés

In a coffee shop the queue is the product. Between eight and nine every second at the counter is a customer deciding whether to wait or walk on. Here is the setup we put in for a typical independent café.

Speed at the counter

A Square Stand keeps the whole menu one tap away — sizes, milks, shots and syrups as modifiers rather than separate buttons, so a complicated order is three taps, not a conversation. A second Terminal sits alongside so payment never waits on the till.

Favourites are pinned for the ten items that make up most of the morning. New staff are usable on it inside an hour, which matters more than it sounds when turnover is high.

Orders that do not need repeating

Orders go straight to the bar or the kitchen — a printer for a small site, a kitchen display where two people are making drinks. Nobody shouts an order twice and nothing is lost when the ticket roll runs out.

Click-and-collect and QR ordering take the pre-order trade off the counter entirely, which is where most of the queue time goes on a weekday.

Regulars, recognised

Loyalty runs off the same sales data, so a regular's tenth coffee is tracked without anyone holding a stamp card. Email marketing is built from the same customer list, which means a quiet Tuesday can be filled from your own data rather than a discount site.

Stock and waste

Beans, milk, cups and pastry counts run through one catalogue. Reporting shows sales by hour and by item, so you can see what to bake and what to stop baking — the single most useful report a café gets out of a proper till.

Common questions