Industry
IT for Anchorage coffee roasters and restaurants.
Your POS goes down on a Saturday morning during the rush. That is the actual problem we are designed to prevent. Network architecture, payment device reliability, and a real human you can call when something stops taking cards.
The IT that runs a coffee shop or restaurant is mostly invisible until it isn't
On a normal day, the wifi works, the POS takes cards, the kitchen tickets print, the back office prints reports. On a bad day, the internet drops at 7:45am, the POS locks up because it cannot reach the cloud, the line backs up to the door, and the manager is calling Toast support who is asking them to power-cycle the router. We design and run the network so the bad day is much rarer, and so when it happens, you have a real engineer who picks up the phone.
Software and systems we already support
- Toast POS — network configuration, device troubleshooting, payment processor integration, kitchen display systems.
- Square for Restaurants and Square POS — terminal configuration, peripheral support, offline mode planning.
- Aloha and other legacy POS — for the older shops still running it. We will help you decide whether to upgrade or maintain.
- Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 — we run both, which is helpful since coffee shops and restaurants split fairly evenly between them.
- QuickBooks Desktop and Online — the back-office accounting that almost every shop runs.
- UniFi networking with proper VLAN segmentation — guest WiFi on its own network, POS on its own VLAN, back-office on a third. The PCI-friendly architecture most shops do not have.
- Mobile device management for staff phones and tablets — for shops using tablets at the counter or for inventory.
The single most common configuration mistake we find
Almost every coffee shop and restaurant we audit has the guest WiFi, the POS terminals, and the office computers all on the same flat network. That is a PCI compliance problem. It is also a security problem. A customer's compromised laptop can talk directly to the card terminal. We separate these into proper VLANs with firewall rules between them. It is not expensive. Most shops just do not know it should have been done that way from day one.
What we do for coffee and restaurant clients
- POS reliability planning, including offline mode configuration for internet outages
- UniFi network design with proper VLAN segmentation between POS, office, and guest WiFi
- ISP redundancy planning for shops that cannot afford to be offline during a peak hour
- Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace administration for office staff
- Cybersecurity, including endpoint protection on the back-office computers that hold payment data
- Multi-location networking for roasters with shop locations
- Vendor management with Toast, Square, ISP, and payment processors so you do not have to be on hold
Get a shop IT health check.
Free 30-minute review of your POS network, guest WiFi separation, payment device security, and ISP failover.
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