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Toast offers a complete POS system for restaurants that unites the front of the house with the kitchen, provides digital ordering and no-contact technology, and enhances the guest experience with easy-to-use order fulfillment hardware, loyalty rewards, and gift cards. Keep reading for the Toast POS full review.
Pricing Plans
Toast offers three main plans, plus a payroll and POS bundle.
Starter Kit: $0/month with a two-year contract
Point of Sale: Starting at $69/month
Build Your Own: Custom pricing
Payroll Package: Starting at $69/month plus $9/month per employee
Toast IS for restaurant owners who need a POS system with high-quality restaurant hardware that can integrate with third-party apps. It's an all-in-one system that can be combined with marketing, payroll, and employee management features to help busy restaurants save time and increase revenue.
Toast offers restaurant-specific hardware and accessories and a full suite of features, including online ordering, marketing, and staff management tools.
Toast has a solid selection of hardware and accessories that help generate revenue by reducing errors and speeding up service.
Data is seamlessly transferred between devices, so if you run out of a menu item, servers can use their handheld device to quickly remove the item, ensuring that it is unavailable from any other device. And if your restaurant gets overwhelmed with orders, you can easily decline online ordering or third-party deliveries to give the kitchen time to catch up.
Toast's Flex products are spill-resistant (a must in the food industry), have a hardwired connection so that you can operate offline, boast "best-in-class" processing speed, and can accept all payment types.
The POS terminal has a flippable screen and can be mounted to the wall, or you can simply adjust its height. Toast's website says that it performs "three times faster" than competing POS systems.
Toast's mobile handheld POS enables you to take orders and accept payments from anywhere and it alerts servers when orders are ready. It has a 24-hour battery life and is spill, drop, and dust-proof.
Servers are alerted via the handheld device as soon as an order is ready to be delivered to a table.
This POS shows guests their order and check total to help ensure accuracy. Customizable tip percentages make it easy for customers to tip well for good service.
Designed to withstand higher temperatures, this POS helps the kitchen stay on top of orders. Orders can be routed to dine-in, takeout, or delivery stations, and alerts can be sent to servers or customers once orders are complete.
The kitchen display system makes paper receipts obsolete. Kitchen staff can immediately see orders as soon as they are entered.
Guests can use this kiosk to place and pay for customized orders. The self-ordering kiosk gives customers the ability to opt in for SMS updates about their order status and sign up for loyalty rewards when they check out.
Toast's accessories include:
Toast's POS integrates with third-party apps and provides easy-to-use analytics and invoicing services.
Toast's cloud-based POS system integrates with over 100 restaurant software applications, including security, delivery management, and analytics apps.
Toast's reporting and analytics tools provide valuable insights into your restaurant's performance, empowering you to make more profitable decisions. You can access real-time data about your menu, labor, and sales, compare sales over time or based on location, and view reports from your phone.
The Labor Summary report is just one of several detailed reports that Toast users can access, including hourly sales and employee productivity reports.
xtraChef is Toast's comprehensive accounts payable and inventory management feature. With xtraChef, you can take pictures of your invoices from your phone and then sync the invoice data with your accounting system. xtraChef comes in a Lite or a Pro version; the Pro version includes recipe cost and inventory management tools.
Toast's online ordering services are customizable, and give you a commission-free way to take orders online.
Toast Online Ordering and Online Ordering Pro plans enable you to:
Toast delivery services are not available for Starter Kit users; all other online ordering services are available as add-ons for all plans.
Toast has some customer relationship management features built in. With Toast Marketing, you can see how many emails were sent, delivered, and opened, and how many customers participated. Toast Marketing can send automatic emails based on the amount customers spend or how many times they visit your restaurant.
All Toast users can add any of the following marketing features to their plans:
Toast enables you to collect customers' emails at the time of checkout to use for email marketing campaigns.
Toast offers several staff management tools, including scheduling, payroll, and automated tip distribution.
Toast integrates with Sling for scheduling, helping you save time by importing employees' schedules and syncing timesheets. The mobile time clock allows employees to clock in and out remotely, and real-time communication tools enable you to make announcements and send group message,s so everyone is on the same page.
Employee management features are not available to Starter Kit users.
Toast's payroll service is available in all 50 states and includes:
Toast partners with insurance provider Next to give its POS users discounted restaurant insurance options.
Next offers many of the insurance products restaurants need, including:
The Toast Pay Card and PayOut system is an alternative to direct deposit, and is available to Toast Payroll and Team Management users. Toast PayOuts are funded by a 0% line of credit. Employees can choose to be paid via this system and instantly access part of their wages or tips between paydays.
Toast Pay Card and PayOut are not currently available in the following states: California, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont.
The tips manager lets you set unlimited rules for automated tip pooling and can integrate with Toast Payroll and Team Management. It enables you to calculate tip earnings based on business day, shift, or orders, and set tip distribution percentages by earning type or sales category.
Insurance, 401(k) referral, and Toast Pay Card and PayOut are included in the payroll and POS bundle package; all other staff management tools are available as add-ons.
One of the things customers love most about Toast is its ease of use. Customers love how quickly their employees learn to use Toast and praise its intuitive user interface.
Toast offers customized plans to suit the budgets of restaurants of all sizes.
Starting prices for its plans are:
All plans come with:
The Starter Kit is designed for restaurants with one location and fewer than 10 employees that need 1-2 terminals. Once you've finished onboarding, you can purchase add-ons from the Toast Shop, including cash drawers, printers, and payroll software. While the Starter Kit has a $0/month advertised starting price and comes with one terminal or handheld kit, users do have to pay for hardware -- either upfront or over time through processing fees. Users who sign up online get charged a higher processing fee (3.09%) when they choose to pay for hardware over time, but you may be able to get a discount if you speak with a sales rep over the phone.
The Point of Sale plan is for growing restaurants or businesses with multiple locations. It is a monthly subscription plan that provides flat-rate processing and your choice of hardware products.
Larger operations that want to use the full Toast platform can sign up for custom pricing with the Build Your Own plan.
With the Build Your Own plan, you can choose from several features, including:
The Restaurants Basics Package is a bundled POS and payroll plan for restaurants that want everything they need to get started in one package.
The Restaurants Basics Package includes:
Some time ago, Toast infamously implemented a $0.99 fee per online order, charged directly to the customer. It ended the practice after just a few days. Now, Toast's payment processing fees are in line with what other apps charge.
Toast gives users two options to pay for hardware and accessories:
Hardware costs for Toast's starter kits are:
Keep in mind that sales reps may offer hardware discounts of up to 50% off when you make a purchase over the phone.
| Starter Kit | Point of Sale | Build Your Own | Restaurants Basics Package | |
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| Starting Price | $0/month | $69/month | Custom pricing | $69/month |
| Hardware | 1-2 terminals or handheld kits | Custom | Custom | Custom |
| POS |
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| Payment processing |
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| 24/7 customer support |
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| Payroll and team management | Available as add-on | Available as add-on | Available as add-on | Lite versions |
| Marketing services | Available as add-ons | Available as add-ons | Available as add-ons | Available as add-ons |
Toast gets mostly good reviews for its customer support on consumer review sites like G2 and Trustpilot. Nevertheless, some customers say that the quality of service depends on the tech you talk to, while others complain about a poor response time.
Toast Central is Toast's resource center where users can access troubleshooting articles, sign up for live or on-demand training, or get in touch with Toast Care. Toast Care is customer service that is available 24/7 via phone or web messaging for all subscribers.
Potential clients can contact customer service via chat or phone. However, Toast's customer support agents may ask you for personal information and try to set up a phone call with a pricing specialist before they will answer your questions. We were unable to get direct answers to any of our questions via Toast's customer support agent on the chat service.
The best way for potential customers to get answers to their questions is to set up a demo with a sales rep.
The main benefit of using Toast is that it is made for restaurants. Its hardware is spill-proof and can handle high temperatures, and its features help streamline the ordering process to cut wait times and help you increase profits.
Toast offers many features in-house, including payroll, marketing, scheduling, inventory, recipe costs, and the ability to waitlist tables. It also integrates with over 100 apps to help support your daily operations, such as digital menu management, online delivery, and analytics software.
Finally, customers love how easy it is for their staff and guests to use Toast. Consumer reviews name Toast's accessibility, simple set-up, and straightforward app integration as reasons why they love its products.
The disadvantages of Toast are mainly to do with pricing transparency. Toast offers starting prices for most of its plans, but there is no other information available on its website about the price range for add-ons. It advertises a starting price of $0/month; however users must meet eligibility requirements for this plan (being a new user, having one location, and signing a two-year agreement), and will have higher processing fees to cover the cost of their hardware if they choose to pay over time. So while there is no monthly subscription fee, it's not truly free.
Understandably, providing pricing for restaurants can be tricky due to the industry's sheer diversity, but it would be helpful for comparison purposes if Toast provided a starting price or a range of what a restaurant owner could expect to pay for specific add-ons. Otherwise, it's a leap of faith that you'll be able to get the features you want at a price you think is fair.
Toast doesn't offer a free trial; the only way to see Toast's features in action is to schedule a one-hour demo with a pricing specialist. Demos aren't necessarily available right away; when we checked, the earliest time we could schedule a demo was a week out.
| Restaurant specific | Loyalty program | Automatic notifications | QuickBooks integration | |
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| Toast POS |
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| Clover POS |
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| Lightspeed POS |
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| Shopify Point of Sale |
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Toast POS is intuitive and easy to use, which is great in the restaurant industry because employees come and go on a frequent basis. In addition, Toast has a variety of customer support and resource options to help with any questions.
For $75/month, you'll receive Toast POS software to support one register as well as workflow management and analytics reporting. The cost after that to add one or more registers is quote-based. Transaction fees are not listed on Toast's website, but the industry average would be around 2.5% of each sale plus a flat rate of $0.15 per transaction.
Toast's proprietary hardware package prices are not listed on its website, but reportedly start at approximately $450 for a tablet register and increase from there to full register packages around $1,350. Add-on services like Toast KDS, Toast Now, and Toast Go and any necessary hardware to support them are quote-based too.
The baseline Toast POS does not support online sales or even provide a virtual terminal. There are several add-on digital sales services, however, that you can pay extra for:
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