Revel Systems reviews

Very good functionality and high quality reporting system. I think this one one of the most advanced POS systems I have used.

Lots of restaurants and retail stores I frequent use Revel. I would try Revel again if given the choice, but I would make sure to get my employees trained in troubleshooting themselves to avoid the potential of a customer service snafu.

Very very bad

Despite the technical issues, our experience with Revel has been great due to its user-friendliness and extensive functionality.

A POS system that is reliable most of the time.

Terrible experience with all teams involved.
The person that was supposed to be handling our case was rude and extremely inattentive
We didn’t even get to start using the system because it was not delivering what we asked for.

The system was easy to learn, thanks god because there is no onsite help and if you have a problem you have to resolve it with and onl the phone operator! That can be time consuming and frustrating if you are not very technologically friendly.

Sales, inventory, predictions, CRM, marketing - all nicely done.

Overall I am happy with the way Revel can handle the complexity of the sales, and the real time reporting.

Very satisfied.

Its terrible that a company can operate in this day and age with such dishonesty - from hiding costs, failing to supply agreements yet embedding them in a url link in the fine print to obscure it, Order forms that order monthly subscriptions then you find out it has a three year term that was never disclosed, sales men that tell you to contact their providers of equipment to get a price, sales men that lie and wont stand by their own word. Then you have the 15k cancellation fee for the 3 year contract you were never advised you had. Customer service teams that don't communicate and pass you off to each other to further yet obscure you from getting any value. A disgraceful company, shame the software is ok, they are now just a greedy corporation with no appreciation or view of their customers. With this company they customer is always wrong and they will tell you so. Overpriced dishonest and corrupt.

We've been with Revel for about 8 months now. I am on the phone with customer support weekly, nearly daily. Our initial integration with Quickbooks was not well supported by their staff and eventually I had to just teach myself how to get the system set up and integrated. We have constantly had issues that when I contact customer service they tell me they don't know why it happened and it must be a glitch in the software. My credit card machine broke after 7 months and Revel could not figure out how to fix it so I called the manufacturer and they told me it was a software issue. Revel's solution was to trade in for a new one, rather than try to figure out what the software issue was. The first customer service agent I spoke to did not even have the manual for the pin pad that I was using.

Multiple times Revel has stopped speaking to Quickbooks without warning and our data has not been pushed through as it should. I've been told that the exchange feature that is built in to the front end of the system does not actually work and so we should stop using it and do a work around so that our entries into Quickbooks will be correct. My completed invoices have gotten stuck between the Ipad and the back office and the payments have therefore not been received into Quickbooks until I discovered the problem. Revel has multiple times overtaken Quickbooks and changed the vendor information in Quickbooks. After multiple phone calls to customer support for a single issue I've eventually been told that my system is out of date and that's what's causing the problem, but it was never brought up in initial phone calls. In the same vein, there is no indication from Revel that I should update the system. In fact for the last update, the app told me that it was the most up to date, but finally on the back end of Revel there was a warning that I needed to update or my system would be obsolete. In fact I was running the most up to date version of the app, but what needed to be done was to download an entirely new app-that was not made clear in Revel's warning, I just happened to figure it out myself. Furthermore, had I not happened to log into Revel's back end on that particular day, I would not have known that I was required to update.

One day the back office stopped sending our daily emailed reports. When I spoke to customer support they told me that it was because the email addresses where the report was sent were separated by commas and not semi-colons. When I mentioned that the commas had been working for 7 months they told me that it was due to an update on their back end that now required semi-colons. When asked how I was supposed to know that and change it I was told that it had been a "known issue" for over a month and that some businesses had a problem and some didn't so they didn't let customers know about the issue.

With all the issues I've had, I've never been able to speak to a supervisor or had any kind of conciliatory gesture like a reduced price made for me and in fact had to pay shipping to and from returning my credit card machine. When I speak to customer service about issues related to Quickbooks integration, they are not trained on Quickbooks so generally cannot help me.

Overall the system is extremely glitchy and inconsistent. It cannot be counted on to work the same way from day to day.

Overall Revel is a total letdown and will be replaced by year end with a better system, lots of things we were promised could be done require using their "Open API" which costs more per month than the entire POS system does for 5 stations. We were not told about the API pricing upfront (or that there was even a cost at all, it was pitched like it was included in the regular fee) just that we could use the API to do everything we told them we needed to do, my project manager informed me of the API pricing during our implementation, when I called out the sales rep for never mentioning the additional cost despite repeated conversations about how critical this was she told me "its not my job to tell you the pricing for the API since that's not my department"

It is also very difficult to impossible to find and load an order in the dashboard by customer. You have to load the customers orders report, find the customer in the list, click show orders, note the order number, then go to the order history report and then you can click through to the order, why isn't the order number under customers order a hyperlink to take me to the order?

They made a systems change to batch process updates to the POS instead of in realtime, we have a custom app that we use for check ins when a customer comes into the store and it adds customers to the revel system so we can link them to a sale and track close rate etc. They used to sync in real time from the dashboard to the stations, after a recent update it takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes for the customers to pull down from the revel dashboard. I have verified they show up on the dashboard instantly as they should, there is just a major delay in syncing back to the iPads now that was not there before the update.

Reporting is very weak in certain areas, you can't view profit by anything other than employee which is worthless if you don't have pay rates loaded which we don't since we aren't using that aspect of the system.

When we receive inventory in the store, we upload it into the revel dashboard via their excel template this works about 75% of the time, the rest of the time it just silently fails, you will never receive any notice that it failed, where it failed etc. So now before I do any uploads, I do an export of what we have immediately before so when it fails I can compare to the inventory after the partial upload to figure out where the import stopped so I can import the rest.

I could keep going but bottom line is if your needs are more than barebones or you are not a restaurant you should look elsewhere for a much better solution.

After months of wrangling with the decision of which system to invest in I cautiously went forward with Revel. 2 terminal system only so if it didn't work out the damages would be minimal. I learned the hard way jumping in with two feet real quick with Clover. (Different business than the one I bought Revel for. The CC processor is really to blame for saying that Clover is a good system for full service restaurants and I'm to blame for not verifying.) That was a disaster. Paying monthly for a pile of stuff I never went live with. Back to Revel. So many negative reviews made me really worried but after so much research, a: it seemed like it was very robust, more than any other cloud based system, something that would be difficult to quickly outgrow, b: relatively cheap entry cost, albeit the most expensive ongoing costs (more on that later), and c: every system turns out to have overwhelming negative reviews by my count.
After reading all the reviews 2 things stuck out to me. One, I was real concerned about the support teams. It was such a common theme amongst so many review sites. Two, I sensed a bit of naivete on many of the negative reviews. After reading between the lines I figured this was a very complex system and one would have to put forth a lot of effort to get it set up and working well for your business. It does not plug and play. It could be but you would be barely scratching the surface of what it is capable of. The lack of support made it seem like someone with little experience with computers and or POS systems should stay far away. We have been live for over a month and I felt compelled to get on here and tell about my experience. Completely exceeded my expectations. To be clear, it has been a challenge getting it all where it is now. We went live 16 days after it arrived in the mail. That's not enough time. My own fault for dragging my feet. Give yourself 30 days. That would be a nice luxury. Plan on adapting it to your business. This system is designed for such a broad spectrum of businesses so don't expect it to be perfect just for you. That will take time. We have so much more tweaking and customizing ahead. Recipe builds, ingredient unit and cost data etc. You will only get out what you put in. The support that comes with the system combined with the fact that you get lifetime updates as the system is improved and having features added makes the monthly cost worth it to me. Thanks to an agent of NY for giving me all the information I needed without any of the typical sales pressures. I will be adding the self serve kiosk sometime this month. Can't wait to bring that exciting feature to our customers.

Sorely disappointed in this millenial run company. No sense of understanding of customer loyalty. When I showed up in person at their offices in San Francisco, it was lunch time and the elevators were a turnstile of delivery people bringing in "take out" food to the office. I was treated very poorly when met by the Director of Sales who tried to just pawn off my issue "until Monday". Here were are suffering from a massive company wide fiasco costing us many man hours and challenges serving our customers when these guys are just sitting around enjoying their venture capital take outs for lunch. Kinda hard to take when you're working your ass off 3 states away with no breaks and no one will even respond/acknowledge the massive mistake made by their company. We were finally told today that they do not even have a customer service/care department...only a customer retention department that they self described as the department for customers considering leaving. YES, we said...that's who we need to talk to (still at 5pm...no contact for this mysterious department provided). Creating an exit plan...Such a bummer. Had such high hopes for this product. Too bad the people behind the scenes totally stink.

Never able to get in touch with a tech it’s never resolved. Poor tech and well I wish I could get 4 months of my life back from being on hold trying to fix their crashing system issues

No other system had the flexibility to provide what we needed. Customization took months to get sorted out (and I am a network engineer during the day). Despite all the hard ships I couldn't imagine switching again. I still experiment with competitors that have lower fees, however can't match half the features and flexibility I get with Revel.

A Huge Mistake w/ Painful Ripple Effects. I want to convey concise specifics regarding where the decision to purchase the REVEL system went wrong without emotion but this process from start to finish coupled with the loss and major internal labor dollars, cuts deep!

Before signing we did our due diligence, as best we knew how. Our team read the pro and con reviews. We took particular note of one review which said get everything in writing prior to signing. Our attempt to do so was to compile an excel doc that listed specifics of everything we needed the system to do for our custom bakery. We received a “yes” we can on the majority of the listed items. Our team sent multiple emails and cataloged them all, from pre-purchase, sales rep dialogue, on-boarding, initial program management, daily questions to various on-boarding team members, help line conference calls, management team conference calls, to and the summary of where the REVEL system failed us miserably. If you would like this information, we would be more than happy to forward you our packet of information. We hired an intern for 6 weeks who worked in tandem with a permanent team member, solely for the purpose of manage the on-boarding and conversion process; with the intent of expediting our transition from our old POS system to new REVEL system.

Our internal plan was so effective that within 2 weeks of receiving the equipment, we were able to ascertain that the REVEL system would not align with our business model. Our internal conversion team learned the platform so well, that they were able to ascertain operational components of the software the help desk and our assigned project manager was not aware (use of modifiers and order category classifications). Our team hit the ground running the day after the contract was signed.

After using this system for a little over a year, I would recommend anyone shopping for POS services look for a solution that has dedicated hardware. An iPad may be great for personal use, but a solution with actual dedicated hardware would have eliminated a lot of headaches for us. The iPad's themselves have numerous features that we don't really need to operate our POS, so it's kind of a waste.

Overall, Revel is a good company. We are a small convenience store at a marina and campground and they are working well for us. One of the reasons we went with Revel is because they have teamed up with Shell Corp. to create an integration for fuel pumps and the Revel point of sales. Revel is the cheapest option on the market, that I was able to find, to be able to offer my customers pay at the pump options. This is still in the works, but they are making steady progress and I am excited for when we can try it out.

We have had others system and this just works great for us. It has a pretty good inventory system and a host of reports. The key is its makes the sales process easy. I have no problem giving Revel a strong recommendation.