Revel POS 101: Search Smarter Not Harder with Alternative Lookups

How much time, would you estimate, do you spend searching for specific products you offer customers? Probably much more than any business owner is really willing to give up. And when creating an excellent customer experience, timing is everything.

To make finding products with diverse descriptions easier, Revel has introduced “Alternative Lookups” into our 2.16 build. This new feature allows users to create and designate additional names for available products. These various labels are not unique to individual products and can be utilized for multiple items, making groups of products easy to locate.

For example, a restaurant owner wants their servers to be able to locate vegan products on the POS. Rather than memorize the menu, cashiers can use the search bar on the POS to quickly find all “vegan” or “gluten free”  items. A drop down list menu will appear and allow the user to choose from the list of products that are associated with the corresponding label. Once the item is chosen the cashier can immediately begin an order.

This field is not limited to alternative characteristics, but could also be utilized for barcodes or PLUs. Multiple barcodes can become a problem for businesses who purchase inventory from several vendors. By adding a single barcode as an identifier, a cashier can use the search bar to manually input or scan the barcode and find all products associated with that barcode. Not only does this make the in-store experience seamless, it keeps inventory organized.

Here’s how it works: After a product has been created, the user has the option to add any value or name to the alternative lookup field. To make edits to the alternative lookup fields on a larger scale, you can export the product menu as an excel spreadsheet. Any changes made can then be imported back into your management console.

To learn more about setting up Alternative Lookups and many other new features, check out our release notes for 2.16 here.

Contributed by Danika Peterson, Revel Systems Sales Engineer