How to Choose Bar Software

Every buying guide in this category is published by a vendor and arrives at that vendor. Being upfront about that is the minimum. What follows is a set of questions that will occasionally point away from us, and the section on when not to buy CoreTAP is not a rhetorical device.

Start with which problem you actually have

Most disappointing software purchases in hospitality are correct products bought for the wrong problem. Three distinct problems get conflated:

I do not know my numbers. You need counting and reporting. Inventory tools solve this and solve it well.

I know my numbers and they are bad. More measurement will confirm the problem at greater expense. You have an execution problem.

I cannot see the venue when I am not in it. A visibility problem, which is usually upstream of a delegation problem.

Being honest with yourself here decides everything downstream. A venue that buys a counting tool for an execution problem will conclude the category does not work.

The seven questions

1. What actually integrates, and how late is it

Ask what data moves, at what granularity, and what the delay is between something happening on the floor and it being visible. Transaction level and daily totals are both called integration and only one supports shift level analysis.

2. Does it surface anything I did not ask for

If every insight requires you to have framed the query, it is a calculator. Legitimate, and should be priced accordingly.

3. Does it name who does what

A finding addressed to nobody produces agreement rather than change. Very few products in this category do this at all.

4. Does it record whether anything happened

Without an outcome record you cannot evaluate the tool, which is convenient for the vendor. Ask to see what that record looks like.

5. What does it not do

The most informative question you can ask any vendor. A clear answer means they have thought about the boundary. No answer means they have not, or would rather not.

6. What happens to my data

Where it lives, who can read it, how long it is kept, whether you can take it with you. Transaction level data describes your trading in detail and it is reasonable to know.

7. What does it cost to stop

Contract length, export format, what happens to history. The switching cost is part of the price and it is never on the pricing page.

When should you not buy CoreTAP?

Four situations where we are the wrong answer, stated plainly.

You do not know your numbers at all. Start with counting and reporting. Execution tooling sits on top of a transaction stream you can already trust; it does not replace a stock count.

You have the discipline and the hours already. If you genuinely run a weekly shift level review from exports and have done for a year, you are getting most of the value. The product removes assembly work, not judgement.

Your point of sale cannot give up transaction level data. Daily totals will not support shift or section analysis, and no amount of processing recovers granularity that never arrived. Ask us this before anything else.

You want a dashboard. If what you want is a live view on a wall, several products do that well and more cheaply than we do.

How to run the evaluation

Give every vendor the same two weeks of your own trading and ask each to show you what falls out. Not a demo on their data, which is chosen to demonstrate the product.

Then ask the same three follow ups. What would you have told me to do. Who would you have told. How would I know next week whether it worked.

The answers separate the category faster than any feature comparison, and you can run it in an afternoon.

The comparisons go through the specific products one at a time, including what each does well. CoreTAP is ours, and it connects to the point of sale you already run.