Toast

As businesses increasingly shift online, providing customers with a seamless payment experience has become just as crucial as having a website. Whether you run a restaurant, retail store, or e-commerce platform, a reliable payment system ensures smooth transactions, enhances the customer experience, and streamlines daily operations.

Payment tools like Toast integrate with point-of-sale (POS) systems to manage inventory, track sales, and generate reports. They allow small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to accept payments in various ways—cards, mobile wallets, and contactless payments. This helps eliminate errors, prevent delays, and speed up checkout, improving both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Toast is one of many tools tailored specifically to address payment processing in restaurants, other solutions such as Square POS, Clover, and TouchBistro may suit different business needs. 

Below are some of the use cases where Toast can be considered the tool of choice for processing payments:

• Real-Time Sales Adjustments: A restaurant manager can use Toast’s live sales insights to monitor hour-by-hour data and make quick adjustments during peak times. For example, if lunch sales are lower than last week, the manager can roll out a mid-day promotion to boost customer engagement and increase revenue.
• Managing Delivery Channels to Avoid Kitchen Overload: Toast allows restaurants to manage incoming orders from various delivery platforms, such as Grubhub. During peak times, restaurants can temporarily pause orders from these platforms directly through Toast. This helps maintain smooth operations and ensures timely service without overloading staff.
• Team Coordination Across Shifts: At a large restaurant with multiple shifts, the management team can use Toast’s integrated log to update staff with important information like menu changes or customer feedback. This ensures smooth communication between shifts, minimizing errors and improving service consistency.
• Streamlined Multi-Location Management: A franchise owner managing several restaurant locations can use Toast’s multi-location view to easily access and compare performance data for all their outlets. They can quickly check sales, inventory, and employee schedules in one place, allowing them to maintain consistent standards across all locations.
• Real-Time Inventory Updates for Enhanced Customer Experience: When the kitchen runs low on a popular dish during a dinner rush, the head chef can use Toast to mark the item as out of stock in real time. This update can be instantly communicated to the front-of-house team, allowing them to inform customers upfront. 
• Employee Shift and Performance Management: A restaurant can use Toast to track staff attendance, manage shifts, and monitor tips earned. The manager can quickly edit shifts or review hours worked, ensuring compliance with labor regulations and providing real-time insights into employee productivity for improved shift planning.

While Toast offers a robust solution for restaurants and food service businesses, certain scenarios may call for alternative platforms. Depending on the industry, business size, or specific needs, other payment processing systems may provide a better fit. Here are situations where other tools might be more appropriate.

• Retail Stores or Non-Food Businesses: Toast is tailored for food service businesses. Retail SMBs or those in other industries may find platforms like Square or Clover a better fit, as these offer specialized tools for inventory management, customer tracking, and sales for non-restaurant businesses.
• Simple Payment Processing Needs: For SMBs that only require basic payment processing, PayPal, Stripe, or Clover may offer simpler, more cost-effective options. These platforms offer straightforward solutions without the complexity of a full restaurant management system.
• Advanced Online Stores: If your SMB is primarily focused on e-commerce, Shopify POS may be more suitable. It provides seamless integration with online stores, advanced inventory management, and shipping features that may not be as robust in Toast.
• High-Scalability Needs: Toast is ideal for managing small and medium-sized businesses with a few locations. As your business grows into a larger franchise or multi-location chain, you may want to explore more scalable platforms like Aloha or Oracle Simphony. These systems are designed for large-scale operations, offering advanced customization, reporting, and integration for complex workflows.

To help you get started with Toast, here’s a brief overview of the steps involved:

Step 1: Sign Up for Toast

Visit the Toast website and sign up for an account. Provide details about your business, including its size, type, and location, to tailor the system to your specific needs.

Step 2: Choose Hardware

Toast offers a variety of hardware options, such as handheld devices for tableside service and POS terminals. Choose the hardware that best fits your business’s operational requirements.

Step 3: Customize Your POS System

Set up your POS system by adding menu items, configuring pricing, and setting up any loyalty programs. Toast’s user-friendly interface allows for quick setup and customization.

Step 4: Train Your Staff

Use Toast’s training resources to onboard your staff, ensuring they are comfortable using the new system, including order entry, payment processing, and customer engagement tools.

Step 5: Begin Accepting Payments

Once set up, you can start accepting in-person or online payments. Toast supports various payment methods, including credit cards, mobile wallets, and contactless payments.

For more details and resources, visit Toast’s Onboarding Resource Center.

Migrating from one payment processing system to another, such as Toast, can seem challenging. But with a clear process, the transition can be managed smoothly. You can export your existing data and set up the new system in a few steps. The below steps will guide you through the migration without causing disruptions to your business operations.

Step 1: Export Data from Your Current System

Export key data like sales records, customer information, and inventory lists from your existing POS or payment processing system.

Step 2: Import Data into Toast

Toast offers support for importing data such as menus, customer records, and sales history. Use their import tools to streamline this process. Learn more about importing customer information for Toast invoicing. For guidance on resolving import failures in Toast, visit here.

Step 3: Reconfigure Settings

Ensure all imported data is correct and reconfigure your menus, pricing, and other settings as needed to fit your business. 

Step 4: Test the System

Before going live, test Toast’s system with sample transactions to ensure smooth functionality across all features.

Step 5: Go Live

Once testing is complete, you can fully transition to Toast and begin using the system for daily operations.

Toast integrates with various tools to enhance its functionality and simplify business operations. These integrations allow small businesses to manage different aspects of their business — from accounting to delivery management — all within Toast’s ecosystem. Below are some of the most compatible tools that work well with Toast.

Payment Solutions

• Tabbi: A mobile payment solution that allows customers to split and pay their checks directly from their phones, streamlining the payment process.
• Up n' Go: A contactless payment system that allows guests to pay their restaurant bill using their mobile phones without downloading an app, seamlessly integrating with Toast’s payment platform.

Staff Tips & Payroll Management

• TipHaus: This tool automates tip distribution and management, ensuring accurate and compliant payouts to staff through integration with Toast’s POS system.
• Zignyl: A delivery management tool that integrates with Toast to help restaurants streamline delivery logistics. Zignyl provides real-time tracking, driver management, and order routing, making it easier to handle delivery operations efficiently.

Ordering and Payment Systems

• me&u: A QR code ordering and payment platform that integrates with Toast, enabling contactless ordering and payments for customers dining in or taking out.
• Tock: As a reservation platform for the hospitality industry, Tock's integration with Toast enables food & beverage businesses to flexibly manage bookings.

Loyalty and Marketing

• Bilt Rewards: A loyalty program that allows customers to earn rewards points by dining at participating restaurants, with full integration into Toast’s POS for tracking and managing rewards.
• Klaviyo: An email marketing and automation platform that integrates with Toast, enabling businesses to send personalized marketing campaigns and track customer engagement.

Accounting, Inventory, and Menu Management

• WISK: A bar and restaurant inventory management system that integrates with Toast to provide real-time data on inventory levels, helping businesses optimize stock management and reduce waste.
• Recipe Costing: Recipe Costing integrates with Toast POS to streamline and simplify food order management, inventory control, and cost tracking. By working together, Recipe Costing and Toast help restaurants efficiently manage food costs, track inventory usage, and optimize menu pricing. This integration enables businesses to better prioritize, accept, and track orders while improving overall operational efficiency and profitability.
• MarketMan: A menu management tool that integrates with Toast to help restaurants track food costs, optimize menu pricing, and streamline vendor orders, ensuring that menus are aligned with profitability goals.

Toast also offers tools to streamline restaurant operations. The Toast Go 2 handheld POS allows tableside ordering and payments, speeding up service. Toast Tap provides contactless payment options with mobile wallets or cards, and Toast Flex offers a customizable terminal for various service environments. These tools integrate seamlessly with Toast’s payment system to enhance efficiency and customer experience.

Toast offers APIs to enable businesses to further extend the functionality of their Toast POS system by integrating with custom applications or third party tools. This program provides developers with access to various APIs that enable custom integrations for order management, customer data, payment processing, and more.

These tools enhance Toast’s capabilities in payment processing, inventory management, tip distribution, and more, providing SMBs with valuable integrations to streamline operations and grow their business. For the full list of integrations, you can explore here.

Here are some tools that might be less compatible with Toast's payment processing system, either due to a lack of integration or because they offer overlapping or redundant services:

• Square, Shopify POS and other systems tailored for retail or eCommerce are generally not compatible with Toast, as their features cater to different business models, making direct integration uncommon.
• Payroll and HR systems like Gusto or ADP, which are not specifically designed for the hospitality industry, may not integrate seamlessly with Toast. Syncing employee hours, wages, and tips may require additional tools or manual processes.
• While Toast works with QuickBooks, it may not integrate as smoothly with accounting platforms like Xero or Sage without third party middleware, and even then, some functionality might be limited, requiring manual data management.
• Reservation platforms such as Resy or SevenRooms don't directly integrate with Toast, meaning businesses would need to manually sync customer data or rely on third party apps for integration.
• Toast offers integrated loyalty and marketing tools, but it may not be compatible with some external platforms like Thanx. This could be a limitation for businesses that rely on third party customer engagement or rewards systems.

Toast offers a robust payment processing system tailored to the specific needs of restaurants and other food service SMBs. While it excels in this sector, businesses with simpler payment processing needs or those in non-food industries may find other platforms more suitable. By carefully considering your business’s unique needs, you can select the payment system that best fits your operations and growth plans.