From EFTPOS To Accounting Software - A Payments Journey In 3 Parts

Today, I’m going to take you on a journey.

And like most journeys, there will be ups, and there will be downs.

There will be laughter, and tears, and I’m not going to lie, we might lose some good people along the way.

But ultimately, after the dust has settled and we take a beat to look back on just how far we’ve come, we’ll be all the better for it.

And isn’t that something we should strive for, at all costs?

Excited yet? Me neither, but we will be once I tell you about where our journey takes place:

Your POS system!

And not just your POS system, but more specifically your payments terminal because today we’ll be exploring what happens when a customer gives you money.

Now, I don’t know about you but the thought of getting paid excites me a little bit.

But why are we going on this journey today, you ask?

I’ll tell you; because there’s a new kid in town, and that kid’s name is Lightspeed Payments, and I’m going to show you just how much it can help with the running of your business in 3 parts:

• Part one: EFTPOS payments of yesteryear
• Part two: reports & reconciliation
• Part three: the wonderful world of accounting software

Part one: EFTPOS payments of yesteryear

Back in the old days (Q2, 2021), things were different.

We had our POS system; it was cloud-based and housed within a tablet, and inside that tablet were connections. It connected to your inventory, your recipes, your menu, even your accounting software. This made it easy to automate things and to link each section of your business together. There were networks created between each of your vital, day-to-day systems, removing the need to input data manually.

But there were physical connections too, like the ones to your EFTPOS terminal. And that’s where the problems came from.

How many times have you been in this situation? You’re working the till and everything’s going great. There’s a line of customers out the door, it’s your busiest day of the year, and you thank god everything’s working as it should.

You even think to yourself, ‘it sure would suck if anything went wrong right now,’ tempting fate as only she can be tempted.

And then, as if on command, you lose connection with your EFTPOS terminal.

The customer tapped their phone against the machine, and it beeped, but it sure is taking a lot longer than usual. 

You and your customer share an awkward laugh, and you both blame your own tech, and tell the other person that it ‘happens all the time’ (even if it doesn’t). Then you both begin to sweat as the eyes of every other person in line burns you with it’s fiery gaze.

You decide to be proactive and cancel the payment in your POS, only to see that that has frozen too so you decide that desperate times call for desperate measures, and you proceed to yank at the spaghetti of wires beneath the counter, hoping the hardest of resets on your EFTPOS terminal fixes everything.

And look, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

When it does, you can get back to taking money from the customers, albeit about 5 minutes later than expected. They’ll forgive you this once, but you know it’s happened before and it’ll happen again.

When it doesn’t, you revert to taking cash only for the rest of the day (or until your EFTPOS terminal fixes itself), and you see what could’ve been a record-breaking day for sales dwindle to nothing as nobody carries cash anymore.

Thankfully, scenarios like this are a thing of the past.

Gone are the days of unplugging and plugging back in your EFTPOS terminal every time it decides to crash. Say goodbye to manual keying errors. Bid farewell to waiting for separate systems to communicate with each other. Never again frantically ask for the manager’s password like you would a medic in the Somme.

With Lightspeed Payments, you can combine both basic needs of any venue: processing orders and taking payments.

Lightspeed Payments offers contactless payments in one, complete system pushed directly from your POS. That means less waiting, less errors, and faster service.

But wait, there’s more. All you have to do is keep reading.

Part two: reports & reconciliation

Let’s keep going, shall we.

After a hard day’s work, the more trustworthy of us were tasked with ‘doing the till’ and this meant that we had to get into the reports.

You’d log into the back office and reconcile the day’s trade. It’d print out a report for you which seemed to have all of the information in one place, but in truth, it didn’t.

Because there was another report you had to print out too: your EFTPOS report. 

For those of us who are a bit long in the tooth (like myself), we’ll recall the EFTPOS terminals of old. These relics were almost always wired, and took a serious amount of button pressing to get to the right menu that had you thanking yourself for those years wasted playing Gameboy instead of doing work at school.

And god forbid you accidentally went into the wrong menu (of which there were many, most of which were never used and to this day their use remains a mystery), because then you’d have to start all over again.

The newer EFTPOS terminals did improve, some coming with touchscreens so that their display could actually communicate with you in full words/sentences.

But you still had to reconcile a separate machine, otherwise you wouldn’t get paid. The EFTPOS takings would hang in purgatory until the next day when your boss slipped a passive-aggressive comment about it into your morning banter.

And there was always the possibility of human error. The numbers on your POS reconciliation don’t match those on your EFTPOS printout meaning that at the end of a long shift you’d have to moonlight as a forensic accountant to try and locate the source of the variance.

Once again, Lightspeed Payments can help

Because your payments and your POS are now one system, it eliminates the potential for human keying errors. After all, accidentally cashing off a payment as EFTPOS when the customer paid in cash can’t happen if an EFTPOS payment doesn’t happen.

The importance of this kind of safety net is only going to increase as we venture further and further towards a cashless society.

Not to mention the time saved after a busy shift. Cashing up can go from multiple printouts from multiple terminals (depending on the size of your venue) to reconciling from a single location, meaning those knock-off beers are ever closer to your waiting lips.

Part three: the wonderful world of accounting software

That’s right, we’re back at the most thrilling of areas when it comes to running your business: accounting!

And I don’t have to tell you just how mind-numbing a process it can be (although I’m about to, of course).

Accounting can be confusing at the best of times. To me, it can appear just as a screen full of numbers that overwhelms until I close the laptop and postpone it for another time when I’m feeling a bit stronger.

When I do finally get around to it, it’s hours spent entering receipts and invoices, and going through the bank feeds trying to match payments to businesses because some legend decided that having their actual business name on their EFTPOS would be too easy.

It’s accounting, people! Leave the nicknames in the locker room where they belong!

And this happens, even when you do pay a bookkeeper to take care of it.

Again, Lightspeed succeeds

Not only can you link all of your accounting software to your POS already (eliminating a lot of the hassle, and tidying up your finances), but with Lightspeed Payments it now means that everything is truly in one spot.

The margin for human error has never been so small. What once was a snarling behemoth sitting opposite you at your desk, is now a speck of dirt on the wall. It’s potential to cause the chaos it once might have has become stymied, and your bookkeeper will thank you for it.

Why should I choose Lightspeed Payments?

Did you not read any of that? Was I talking to myself?

Lightspeed Payments takes away the final hurdle in your service, your reporting, and your accounting. It puts everything you need to both process payments, and reconcile them into a single location, saving you time, money, and a whole heap of headaches.

So, if a fast, efficient business that’s easier to manage sounds like something you’d like to experience, I’d say that’s as good a reason as any to try Lightspeed Payments.