How Pay at Table with Zeller Terminal Can Boost Your Restaurant Revenue

If you’re shopping around for a payments provider or a point-of-sale system, you may have come across the term ‘integrated EFTPOS’. In this article, we explain what this technology is and how your business can benefit from integrating with Zeller Terminal. Integrated EFTPOS is a direct connection between your point-of-sale (POS) system and your EFTPOS machine. When these two systems are integrated, sales totals that are rung up on the POS are pushed automatically to the  EFTPOS terminal , eliminating the need for staff members to key in the sales value manually on the machine before payment. With the tap of a button on your register, payment details are automatically transferred to your EFTPOS terminal, ready for your customer to tap, dip, or swipe. To explore the best POS systems available in Australia and find one that suits your needs, check out our comprehensive blog article on the topic. Six ways Zeller Integrated EFTPOS will benefit your business. 1. It reduces human error. An unintegrated EFTPOS machine requires a staff member to manually enter the sales total into the terminal before the payment can be processed. Unavoidably, this process will lead to human error. If a customer is accidentally overcharged, not only do you risk losing their business in future, but it takes time away from your staff to process refunds for incorrect payments. Similarly, if a customer is accidentally undercharged, it is unlikely that you will be able to recoup the lost revenue, and it can lead to frustration and confusion when it comes to end-of-day reconciliation. Integrated EFTPOS eliminates these risks, by removing the need for manual entry into the EFTPOS machine. 2. It makes transactions faster. Integrated payments allow you to serve more customers, faster than ever, by removing unnecessary steps in the payment process. Whether you use a touch screen or a barcode scanner, integrated EFTPOS allows data to be pulled directly from your system, reducing waiting times at the checkout. You’ll also save time at the end of the day. Thanks to two-way communication between your devices, end-of-day reconciliation becomes a breeze, with payment transactions relayed back to your POS automatically. 3. It’s free and fast to set up. Although some merchant services providers may charge upwards of $10 per terminal to integrate with your POS system , Zeller’s integrated EFTPOS solution is free. Similarly, the process of getting set up is simple and self-service. Traditionally, integrating EFTPOS and POS systems has required a third party engineer or integration specialist to arrange a time to visit your business premises in person, with Zeller, you can connect your systems remotely, and in most cases, in less than 15 minutes. 4. You won’t lose sales if your POS system fails. In the event of a POS system outage (or other disruption to your POS system), every other integrated EFTPOS solution will lock you out of your EFTPOS terminal – forcing you to contact their customer service centres in order to get back up and running. We understand it’s critically important that, no matter what, you are still able to process sales at your business. If your POS system suffers a disruption for any reason, you can continue to use Zeller Terminal. Simply toggle on ‘Card mode’, and you will be able to continue processing transactions via Zeller Terminal without any downtime. 5. You have over 600 POS platforms to choose from. Whether you’re using a  cloud-based or on-premise POS  solution, with Zeller, you can be confident that – no matter which POS you choose, or industry you operate within – you’ll get the benefit of integrated payments. Zeller is proud to partner with over 600 POS providers, including leading solutions such as  Abacus , Impos ,  Zii ,  H&L ,  Oracle ,  Whoods ,  Redat ,  Task ,  Hike , plus a long list of others to service a wide range of industries and business sizes. To view the full list of POS providers that Zeller integrates with, visit the  Zeller Partner Hub . Not sure what POS system to choose? Use our Best POS Systems Guide for 2024 to help you find the right provider for your business. 6. You can turn tables faster with Pay at Table. Hospitality businesses using  H&L POS  enjoy the added benefit of Zeller’s innovative  Pay at Table  solution. This integrated technology allows Zeller Terminal to function as an extension of your H&L POS, allowing staff members to view open tables, see total outstanding bills, take payments and close tables — all on one device. Rather than the customer paying at the counter or finalising the bill in the traditional, time-consuming manner, waitstaff can deliver the bill and the mobile payment device, all at the same time. Read our blog article to learn how  Pay at Table  works.

Hailing from Brisbane, via Barcelona, Adele Arkell burst onto the café scene in 2001 and has been shaping our tastes ever since. The founder and owner of St Kilda’s popular Radio Mexico was a trailblazer in Melbourne’s burgeoning breakfast circuit before turning her hand to chilaquiles and tacos. We sat down with the hospitality veteran to talk about BLATs, barbacoas, and the secret sauce to a successful restaurant. When Adele Arkell started running cafés, the menus were big and English. “Everything was all about big breakfasts and eggs Benedict.” she explains. “As a self-taught chef, I had my own ideas about what I liked to eat, so I didn't really follow the convention of what was already available.” Armed with a fierce conviction, she and a group of friends from her home city of Brisbane made the bold move to open a coffee shop directly next to a well-established competitor “It was massive, it was a really big deal. It’d been there for about 5 years and was killing it. And we opened up right next to them because we wanted to do something different.” At the time, Melbourne’s coffee culture was still burgeoning; lattes were served with skim milk and you’d be hard-pressed to find one topped with ‘art’. So when Adele’s team started pouring full-cream and soy milk coffees adorned with hearts and rosettas, it didn’t take long for the word to get out. Champions of breakfast. It was in these early years that Adele’s signature style for ‘everyday eating’ began to take form. “We wanted to make food that you could eat every day… Something simple, something that was easy to eat, really yummy, but something you wouldn't really make at home.” Perhaps the archetype of Adele’s everyday cuisine came in the form of the beloved BLT remixed with avocado. “It's really ubiquitous now, but we actually introduced the expression BLAT”, a dish that now graces café menus all over the world. This fact of making an otherwise simple breakfast a little bit fancy was what Adele and her team became known for, setting a tone for the way that café culture would develop over the next few years, and inadvertently joining the founding members of Melbourne’s world-renowned breakfast scene. Off the back of their success on Acland Street, the group went on to open more than a dozen cafés over the next fifteen years, breathing new life into old, dilapidated spaces before moving onto something else. “We'd do the café, we'd build the clientele, then we'd renovate it and then we’d sell,” explains Adele, “we worked very hard. It was very bootstrap.” Through this process, however, there came a point when she realised she was ready to focus her attention on something else. By accident or by design, while on a trip to New York, she discovered Mexican cuisine. “I wanted to keep doing casual dining, with high quality, accessible, healthy food that you could eat every day… and Mexican fit that to a tee.” The birth of ‘Mel-Mex’. Adele spent three years researching Mexican food. A fluent Spanish speaker, – having spent several years living and working in Barcelona – Adele was able to delve deep into the cuisine, rather than relying on the Tex Mex influences that dominated the English-speaking search results. “I’m not Mexican, I don’t have a Mexican grandmother who can tell me all the secrets, I had to work it out on my own. I had to meet people and search YouTube videos. I had to read cookbooks in Spanish, because I wanted to get to this thing that was really unique and different.” She opened the doors to Radio Mexico in St Kilda in 2012 with a menu that boasted myriad flavours from all over the country: barbacoa tacos from Guadalajara, classic Yucatan cochinita pibil pulled pork, and tacos al pastor, a popular dish from the capital. While Adele has always strived to do justice to the original dishes, she understands her market, and has always kept her customers front of mind. “We try to hit authenticity from a different angle. Our food is not ‘authentic’ per se, you'd never find this in Mexico, but there are so many influences that only come from there.” What she wound up with, is what she deems today as “Mel-Mex”, a distinct hybrid that takes Mexican flavours, and combines them with Melbourne’s unique dining culture. A restaurant is what your customers make it. Located a stone’s throw from St Kilda’s iconic Palais Theatre and Luna Park, and surrounded by the neighbourhood’s newly developed residential highrises, Radio Mexico’s clientele is unique. “We get a lot of people going to shows, but we also have a lot of regulars with the high-density population. So, we cater for people who just want a beer and a taco, but we also cater for people who want to sit for a few hours.” Responding to the needs of her clientele didn’t happen by chance. In each venue Adele has run, she has worked to uncover its individual character, something that can’t always be forced, but that develops in response to the people, the location, the space, and with time. When asked what she believes is the making of a successful venue, she repeats the idea of sustainability, “It takes so much effort to build these restaurants, you want the idea to be something that can really take root in people’s sensibility in the area, particularly your locals.” Find a product that is approachable, accessible, and high quality, and stick with it, she advises. “It's sticking to something that will actually make it really refined… Sometimes you’ve gotta go through the pain, but I really think the best long term sustainable choice is to just stick with it, because no one can run it like you.” When asked if she’s ever considered selling Radio Mexico, she admits that she has, but that not selling it was the best decision she’s ever made, “I'm here forever. I've decided. I'm committed for life. I'm married to Radio Mexico.” she laughs. The true meaning of hospitality. A sustainable business that continues to service the community into the future doesn't just come from good products, it requires good management. “You want to employ staff that you can keep for a long time, you can’t work them into the ground. Everyone's gotta be part of the organism.” Adele says. Over her career she has worked tirelessly to develop her own style of operating, and in each venue she’s run, has made sure that everybody is on the same page. “Twenty years ago I’d get these young male chefs coming in and calling me ‘chef’. I’d say "Let's drop it and just focus on the food instead of the hierarchy.”” Not having come up through the traditional chef training, Adele has lent more on her instincts than her technical skills, and she believes it’s what more women in hospitality should be doing. “Women have a feel for the true sense of hospitality.” she says. “Hospitality is often approached as an accounting proposition, but people forget what the word ‘hospitality’ means… it’s all about collaboration and interaction and face to face.” Something she believes women do inherently well. “I would just say to any woman in business, do it in a woman’s way. Do it in your own way.” To give good service, you need to receive it. As an active member of the service industry, Adele knows how to recognise good service, and she doesn’t stand for anything less than the best. “Service is a big deal for me. That’s why I love using local startup companies because often I'm in contact with the people who are very close to the development of the business… so I can relate better.” Her question to any service providers, be them suppliers or tech companies, is always “If I have a problem, will somebody pick up the phone?” Since transitioning to Zeller in early 2022, someone has always been at the other end of the line. “Zeller’s service is very good,” she says. “What's really important is that the Terminals work, they don't fail, they're fast, they connect. And also I love being able to easily search transactions in a hurry… we could never do that through the bank terminal.” For a fast-paced business like Radio Mexico, being able to visualise their cash flow has also been a huge advantage, especially when it comes to recognising dips or spikes in revenue “I use the Zeller Dashboard a lot. It’s a great back-of-house tool and it’s very easy to use… It’s a great way of getting that information that you most likely wouldn’t have searched for, but because it’s there, you might notice something that you’ll want to follow up on.” If Adele Arkell were to write a book about opening a restaurant, the chapters might read something like ‘carving out a point of difference’, ‘defining your own style’, and ‘sticking with it’. However she knows more than anyone that to be truly successful in hospitality you have to work hard, and you have to love what you do. As she says, “hospitality is to care for someone, to give service, to be of service, and to listen”. Indeed, taking a seat at Radio Mexico is to feel truly looked after, and it’s this feeling that might just be the secret sauce that keeps people coming back year after year. To read about other Australians growing their businesses with Zeller, head to the Zeller Business Blog and  sign up to our newsletter  to receive stories straight to your inbox.

Innovated and engineered in Melbourne, Zeller Terminal 2 features a never-before-seen design, and a built-in point-of-sale. Discover what’s under the hood of this fully integrated, all-in-one payments and POS solution. Whether you’re starting a new business or scaling up, one of the best things you can invest in to support your growth is the right technology to manage payments and inventory. However, we know that POS software and managing multiple providers can be costly to growing businesses. It’s why we're introducing Zeller Terminal 2 : a next-generation payment terminal that comes with a free, built-in point-of-sale (POS) app, Zeller POS Lite . Building on the reliability, ease-of-use, and affordability of its predecessor, Zeller Terminal 2 offers businesses even more powerful functionality when it comes to tracking and recording sales, and elevating the customer experience, all at an extremely affordable price. Here’s what you can expect from this latest release: Sleek hardware design. The first noticeable feature about Zeller Terminal 2 is its new sleek profile. Its sleek, ergonomic design is the first of its kind, and lends itself both to being hand-held or placed on the countertop. It comes in three stylish colours: white, black, and graphite grey, allowing you to customise the payment experience to your business’s aesthetic. Paperless receipts. A recent study* revealed that Australia produces 10.6 billion paper receipts annually, but because of their chemical coating, none of them can be recycled. With consumers and businesses becoming increasingly aware of their environmental footprint, many are choosing digital receipts as a convenient and sustainable alternative. Zeller Terminal 2 embraces this step forward, doing away with a receipt printer all together. Instead, customers can choose to have their receipts sent via email or SMS, or they can quickly scan a QR code which appears on-screen after the payment has been processed, and allows them to download their receipt directly to their smartphone. Built-in point-of-sale system. The most notable feature of Zeller Terminal 2, is its built-in cloud point-of-sale software: Zeller POS Lite. Designed for micro, small, and mobile businesses, this free, easy-to-use POS solution records sales and delivers a fast and secure customer checkout experience – without the need for cumbersome or complex POS hardware and software. With Zeller POS Lite, you can: Add an item library:  Add and edit new items via Zeller Dashboard or directly on Zeller Terminal 2, or upload an existing library from your previous POS with a bulk item import. You can also use the same library for  Zeller Invoices . Manage your items:  Update item details including images, descriptions, prices, categories, and generate automatic SKUs. Any product changes are made in real-time and synced across all platforms. Create variants and modifiers: Customise your product offering with modifiers (options that can be added or changed – such as alternative milk, toppings, or special requests) and variants (size, style, colour, etc.). Customise your grid:  Quickly access top sellers or frequently used items, discounts, or categories on your home screen to keep the queue moving and customers happy. Set up multiple sites:  If you expand your business, simply purchase another Zeller Terminal 2 for your new location and log in. All your items will be available and any site-specific attributes, modifiers, or discounts can be added as needed. Generate itemised receipts:  Offer customers an itemised receipt via email, SMS, or QR code. View detailed sales reports:  Understand what you are selling and when with detailed reports highlighting sales patterns, popular items, and revenue streams. Note, this feature will be available in the coming weeks. Manage discounts:  Create and manage discounts via Zeller Dashboard, Terminal 2 and add descriptions to different discounts for greater clarity. Get set up instantly, for free: Zeller POS Lite comes automatically installed on Zeller Terminal 2, with no monthly software fees or additional charges. All you need to do is follow the steps to set up your item library, and start selling. Light or dark mode and customisable screensavers. Zeller Terminal 2 is designed to suit the aesthetic of your business. Not only does the hardware come in three colours, but the interface can also be customised to match your style. Choose from light or dark mode, and set a custom screensaver to give your device a branded look. Plus, all the features you know and love. While boasting all-new functionality and a fresh design, Zeller Terminal 2 does not compromise on any of the features that our customers have grown to love. Zeller Terminal 2 continues to accept payments from all cards and devices, integrates seamlessly with over 600 third-party POS providers, and offers reliable Wi-Fi, 4G SIM card, and Ethernet connectivity. Plus, automated surcharging, tipping, and split payments can all be switched on or off depending on the needs of your business. Who is Zeller Terminal 2 designed for? Zeller Terminal 2 is an EFTPOS solution that is designed to adapt to any Australian business – no matter the size or industry. For smaller or mobile businesses – cafés, ice cream shops, bakeries, food trucks, market vendors, florists, or retail stores and event venues with a limited inventory – Zeller Terminal 2 with Zeller POS Lite can serve as an end-to-end point-of-sale and payments solution. Combining payments, sales processing, and financial management into one ecosystem, these businesses can get paid faster, reduce operational costs, and keep a closer eye on their inventory and cash flow. While for larger multi-location businesses and enterprises, the ability to integrate Zeller Terminal 2 with over 600 third-party POS providers means you can get the best of Zeller’s EFTPOS technology with your preferred checkout experience. Franchises or businesses that require a fleet of devices, will benefit from Zeller’s unbeatable affordability, advanced multi-venue reporting, and the ability to manage their entire EFTPOS fleet in one place. Premium payments at an affordable price. Whether you run a small mobile coffee cart or a multi-venue enterprise, Zeller Terminal 2 is designed to adapt to your needs – both in functionality and style. Integrated into Zeller’s existing ecosystem, it provides businesses with a comprehensive overview of their finances, eliminating the need for multiple providers, streamlining the sales process, and ultimately getting them paid faster. Retailing at just $199, with a low, flat transaction fee of 1.4% and no monthly rental fees, Zeller Terminal 2 is Australia’s most affordable all-in-one POS and payments solution. Taking less and giving you more, Zeller Terminal 2 is the ultimate ally for accelerating your business growth. *‘Life Journey of an Average Receipt’ report, commissioned by Slyp, undertaken by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).