Buying drinks with bar cards is taken for granted now, but 15 years ago it was relatively novel and security, reliability, capability and integration were challenging issues for EPoS systems. In 1999 Chips set new standards and in tandem with the Toshiba till hardware, has stayed in front ever since.
One of Chips’ first customers was Sandiway GC, the widely admired open qualifying course in the North West. As Secretary/Manager Yvonne Bould commented, “The club has been operating Chips for many years, and with the various updates and some new Toshiba hardware, it’s proven a very good piece of technology for the club.”
“Our bar staff really like using it. Our members enjoy checking their bar balances, results and latest handicap via the web services option. It’s certainly a reliable piece of equipment and we’ve always had excellent support from MH Systems. With all the other things I have to focus on at the club, MH Systems definitely provides the sort of partnership we like having with a supplier.”
Exploiting its background in banking software, Chips still sets the bar for data security, enabling local automatic back up on each EPoS unit when servers fail. Saving sales data and providing stand alone operation has proved a lifeline for many clubs. To make a club’s accounting easier, Chips’ nominal ledger report uses Sage-based item codes to facilitate transfers of sales data. With up to 23 product tabs per page and as many pages as a club wants, it’s potentially a huge amount of products and data.
Five years ago, Chips gave clubs a whole new and very innovative membership service: members could now go to their own webpage on the club website to see their real time bar card balance, latest handicap, and competition results. Chips can also be integrated to work with other developers’ software, including CLUB View, BRS Golf, HandicapMaster, Croft and Eagle, provide multiple purchasing by the same card for eg. drinks, food and competitions, and run promotions such as points-driven offers, 2-for-1s and ‘buy one, get one free’ offers to be run with ease.
Today, the latest version of the Chips EPoS system continues to offer market leading features, for example, combining daily Z reads post clear down into weekly summaries, operating with two different currencies, driving access control systems, managing multiple kitchen printers for clubs with more than one kitchen facility, checking the ID of members, staff attendance analysis, network speed testing, and online support that can reach into the club’s own software and sort things out, search and filter all sales transactions.
As MH Systems’ director Sabine Duret commented, “15 years ago we gave clubs the kind of EPoS systems they badly needed. Today Chips continues to provide our customers with market-leading levels of security, reliability, capability and user-friendliness, and keep their clubs ahead of the game.”
MH Systems www.mhsystems.co.uk