Top 5 Features of the Best Festival POS Systems

While there are many preparations to be made for participating businesses, the choice of event point of sale solutions is up there as one of the most important.

2023 is predicted to be a big year for festivals, with sales set to surpass their pre-pandemic predecessors. With bigger crowds and more demand than ever, your festival POS will make all the difference when it comes to providing an outstanding customer experience.

With that in mind, we look at everything companies need to consider when selecting the right event POS system for their festival.

Accepting offline payments

Today’s payment systems are predominantly cloud-based meaning that the software is stored online and accessed through a range of mobile and static devices. For most businesses, especially those with static sites, this isn’t an issue. Businesses on the festival circuit, however, can encounter difficulties with connectivity. Using a festival POS device that allows offline payments like Square Terminal, and Square Register ensures seamless payments even in areas where it is not possible to connect to the cloud.

Once it is enabled, offline payments are automatically activated whenever internet connectivity is not available.

Fast and efficient check-out process

In an age where 48% of all payments are made using a debit card, today’s businesses need to accept card payments at festivals. What’s more, a fast and efficient check-out process is essential. Contactless payments make payments faster, but without robust payment processing power, your festival POS may still result in long queues.

Not all event POS systems are able to process payments as quickly as you need them to. Square’s competitive processing speed makes it possible to meet demand at your next event.

For a seamless payment experience at festivals, businesses should also ensure their PDQ systems or terminals can be fully integrated with other POS providers. This requires plug-ins that integrate flawlessly and offer a lag-free user experience.

Robust reporting capabilities

Seeing how much money your business is making at a festival can be challenging. If you have multiple food stalls and bars connected to your event POS system, you may prefer a provider that can give you insight into: which locations are most profitable, your peak times and where you need additional support.

Some providers don’t distinguish between different sites and only give you overall figures. Manually reconciling these locations can be very time consuming. Fortunately, Square POS features robust reporting across multiple locations simultaneously.

Permissions and team management

Establishing a presence at a festival usually means working with independent contractors and casual hires. This presents businesses with an element of risk.

However, this risk is easy to mitigate with a POS system that has different permissions and levels of access for different team members. Square’s customisable employee permissions can do all of this while also enabling different users to change prices, add discounts and even log other users in and out.

It also has a robust suite of team management features to help make workflows more efficient. As well as granting custom permissions, team management features allow businesses to assign team commission rates, create and publish rotas, keep track of workers’ hours and automate tip pools.

Ability to make changes in real-time

Applying discounts and price reductions/increases at festivals in response to appetite can make your business presence more competitive, get the attention of customers, boost revenue, reduce waste and improve your brand’s value proposition.

Because Square POS is cloud-based, users can apply discount codes and price changes that are implemented across different terminals, card readers and POS stands with immediate effect.

With the right festival POS system, businesses can eliminate friction for customers and staff alike and ensure that their brand is the star of the show at every festival.