Restaurant and Bar Industry

Restaurant and Bar Industry Solutions

The Challenge:

How to provide secure tableside credit card processing in restaurants and bars that helps speed restaurant/bar workflow and reduce the potential for fraud.

A typical credit card payment in restaurants and bars exposes customers and businesses to potential theft and fraud. The server delivers the bill to the table, the customer hands over a credit card, and the server then takes the card to a central Point of Sale (POS) location for processing, after which they return the receipt to the customer for a signature.

Bellatrix Systems recognized the need to safely and securely collect credit card payments at the table – where the card stays with the customer. This would require a portable payment acceptance method capable of interfacing with the restaurant’s existing POS system.

The Solution:

CATS comboBellatrix developed a unique portable payment acquisition device with three components:

  • Payment capture unit – consists of a payment folio that contains the ticket and an attached magstripe card-reader for secure payment acquisition
  • Central docking station – uses infrared (IR) light to download transaction data, and displays the collected card data on a color touch-screen LCD.
  • A USB interface provides a universal solution for connecting to a wide variety of restaurant POS systems for final processing

We designed the many physical components, software and interfaces necessary to integrate our payment capture technology with POS systems and larger accounting and inventory control systems.

The Outcome:

The result, a revolutionary, secure and affordable ‘card at table’ technology for processing credit card transactions in restaurants, bars and night clubs:

  • Servers can collect credit card payments at the table, while allowing customers to keep their cards in their sight. This tableside security decreases the opportunity for theft and fraud, which protects both customers and business owners.
  • The ‘card at table’ service’ is a less expensive alternative than other ‘Pay at Table’ products which are on the market.
  • This technology is user-friendly:
  1. First, the customer or the server swipes the card right at the table using the magstripe reader on the payment capture unit. If the customer swipes the card, a service indicator illuminates to summon the server to the table for closing the transaction.
  2. Then the server takes the capture unit to the central POS location for downloading.
  3. The server touches the capture device to the dock, which reads and transfers the data.
  4. Transactions then display on the dock’s screen for review.
  5. The POS software accepts and processes the payment and prints out a customer ticket, as it would with any other transaction.

Bellatrix Systems manufactures this technology for TablePay of America who market and sell this technology nationwide.

 Service:

Technologies:

Read more about the some of the technology behind this product in  “A User-Friendly LCD touch-Screen Calibration Process” at the techonline.com website.