No Dramas for New EPOS System at the Hampstead Theatre
The collaboration between card payment processing system developer Commidea, electronics giant Sharp and London based retail system supplier Asset Epos Systems Ltd., part of the EPOS Systems Group of companies, a national network of high tech EPOS integration companies who specialise in this type of state of the art project, means that waiting times at the bar, particularly during intervals where every second counts, will be kept to a minimum. Financial management and reporting will be easier and all credit and debit card transactions will be processed efficiently and securely.
Designed by award-winning architects, Bennetts Associates, the Hampstead Theatre is the first new stand-alone theatre to be built in London since the National Theatre opened in 1976 and features the latest in technology throughout. When it came to specifying a new EPoS system for the café bar, only the latest in technology would suffice. Together, Commidea, Sharp and Asset Epos Systems Ltd provided the solution.
Commidea, one of the UK’s leading developers of credit and debit card payment processing systems, supplied their WinTi system, a high performance on-line card payment processing system that offers users a combination of flexibility, efficiency and reliability.
Ideal for busy working environments, where speed and ease of use are paramount, WinTi is available as two modules – a front-end operator interface for data entry and a core-processing module. Fare Catering, who operate the café bar at the Hampstead Theatre, specified just the WinTi core processor, integrating it directly with Sharp’s UP5350 point of sale terminals.
WinTi, a 32-bit Windows application, has been developed by Commidea to offer retailers a system that authorises transactions at the point of sale or point of order entry and then processes the payments en masse at the end of each day. Suitable for both cardholder present and not present environments, the system supports multiple merchant account processing, corporate purchasing cards and multi-currency processing.
For speedy processing, Fare Catering chose to implement WinTi using ISDN for authorisations, using Commidea’s bureau service for transmission of settlement files to their acquirer. As a result, average authorisation times have been reduced to a mere four to six seconds per transaction and settlement is both accurate and reliable.
As part of the project, which was coordinated by Asset Retail Systems, Fare Catering also chose Sharp’s new Interval Drinks system, a system that allows customers to pre-order drinks that are then prepared during the performance, in time for the interval.
The café bar, which is open from 9am to 11pm, not only provides drinks during performances but also breakfast espresso, lunchtime bites and food and drinks throughout the evening and the new EPoS system will ensure that there will be no dramas processing customers orders in the future.