If you operate a restaurant business you might be considering implementing EMV technology in order to accept chip cards. If so, you may be wondering how chip card acceptance will work with your restaurant Aloha pos help manual and what operational changes might be necessary.

Many restaurant Aloha pos help manuals can be configured to accept chip cards by upgrading the card reader. Instead of swiping the cad through a magnetic stripe reader as usual, a chip card is inserted into an EMV-capable terminal when making a transaction. Other Aloha pos help manuals may require a software upgrade that enables EMV protocols, in addition to a hardware change that allows the card to be inserted instead of swiped. For many retail applications, those changes are largely limited to hardware and software and have little impact on the flow of business. Restaurants however, have additional considerations to make.

With traditional credit cards, the customer normally hands their card to the server, the server takes it to the Aloha pos help manual, runs the transaction, and returns the receipt to the table for the customer’s signature, and the customer adds a tip and signs the receipt. With chip and signature cards, this system will continue to work for the most part, with one major exception–adding tips.

Tip adjustment works differently with EMV cards because unlike standard credit cards where the tip can be added later, the total transaction amount must be known and input up front. Asking customers for their tip amount before running the transaction can be uncomfortable for both customers and servers alike.

Chip and PIN cards, as opposed to chip and signature cards, present even more challenges as they require the cardholder to participate in the transaction by inputting a PIN number while the card is in the terminal. Asking customers to get up from the table and accompany the server to the terminal to perform a transaction is perhaps the most disruptive scenario the card acceptance changes EMV presents.

The most common and perhaps practical solution to the tip adjustment problem is a hand held POS terminal that servers can take to customers in order to run transactions at the table. Tableside terminals enable the server to place the card in the terminal and then hand it to the customer to complete the transaction. At this point, the customer can select the tip and sign or input their PIN.