How a Bendigo café owner uses Apple iPads and Square to help manage his business: My Best Tech

Jesse Gollan is the owner and barista at the Get Naked Espresso Bar at 73 Mitchell Street, Bendigo.

We’ve got a coffee shop in Bendigo in Central Victoria. Our niche is that we only sell coffee, not food and coffee like most of the other cafés around here do. We pride ourselves on having the highest customer service standards, and we use Honeybird coffee, which is roasted in Mount Beauty.

Previously, we were using pen and paper to take all our orders. Instead, we now use Square along with an app called Fresh KDS. The new system allows us to throw the pen and paper away and focus more on the customers.

The app – Fresh KDS – receives orders from an iPad, and connects wirelessly through a router to the Android tablet on top of our coffee machine. That shows us the upcoming orders and times them, and there’s no wires. Then, when customers are done, they pay with the Square.

Because it does real-time tracking, you don’t need to count up the sales at the end of the day, and if I can’t come into the shop for whatever reason, I can log in to the app and look at how sales are going in real time on the dashboard.

We’re really looking to streamline things further, and we’re planning to get a ChromeCast and a big screen so everyone can see the sales tally on a big screen, which would be a nice bonus.