Processing Pitfalls of Fine Dining

Creating a fine dining experience is crafting the balance between the highest level of food, service and atmosphere. The food service business is an extremely complex operation, and the more streamlined the processes are, the greater chance it has of succeeding. The last thing that a restaurant wants to deal with is complications on the payment processing front.

A common challenge that restaurants face is managing the overhead and administrative operations. Many restaurant managers will be required to stay overtime until the books are balanced each night, which has become more complex since the shift to EMV. It requires new equipment, that without it makes merchants responsible for chargebacks. Either way, it can be an administrative nightmare.

Since the liability shift last October, merchants that are not EMV ready are responsible to handle and cover customer chargebacks. Fighting chargebacks can be a time consuming process. Oftentimes a customer will claim that they were not at the restaurant when a purchase was made, which will require digging up and going through the entire evening’s security footage.

The issue has been exacerbated since customers became aware of the shift. Consumers realize that it is harder for restaurants to fight chargebacks without the administrative infrastructure that banks have, and dispute charges more often because they are sure that they will likely go through.  It’s become commonplace for customers to charge back a large dinner because they know they’ll be able to get away with it. Merchants have the motivation to switch to EMV ready equipment, but that brings its own challenges as well.

Many merchants opt to use a standalone terminal to process EMV cards that is separate from their POS system. Since the terminal is not communicating with the POS, it can create a tremendous bookkeeping headache. If a single digit is entered incorrectly, restaurants will have trouble balancing the books. Even a slight mistake can be a tremendous reconciliation heachache when it comes to accounting and taxes.

Fortunately, there’s an EMV solution that solves these problems by linking terminals to a restaurant’s POS system. Cardknox, a software company specializing in EMV, has mastered these integrations. “Our out-of-scope solution can be implemented with just 10 lines of code.  For restaurants and the fine dining business, it’s been a total game-changer,” said Yanky Weiss, CTO at Cardknox.

“We recently integrated with the Supermenu POS system” added Mark Paley, Director of Partner Sales at Cardknox. “They service thousands of merchants globally. It’s a seamless way for restaurants to maximize efficiency by streamlining the payments portion of their business, so restaurant owners and managers can focus on what they do best.”

Wei Kong, CEO of Supermenu commented that Cardknox was a vital solution for his clients. “Restaurant owners had been asking me for an EMV solution to integrate my POS with their terminals. To find a solution for them was very exciting. Working with the Cardknox integration team to implement their nimble SDK was simple and straightforward.  We adopted a skill-based approach here: Supermenu concentrating on our POS system, Cardknox on developing further security and integration solutions, and my clients on improving their businesses.”