Willow & Co. trade out of a single shopfront on Dean Street — coffee, a cabinet, a kitchen and a counter that has to keep moving through the morning. The menu is short on purpose. The volume is not.
They were running Lightspeed. It is a genuinely capable platform — we set it up for other clients and we recommend it where it fits. It just did not fit here. Reporting they could not act on, a catalogue that was hard to change, and depth designed for a much more complicated business than theirs.
Each of those is small on its own. Together they meant the owners were spending time on the system instead of on the shop.
A café POS is judged at 8:15 on a Tuesday.
With six people in the queue.
The hardware is the easy part of a changeover. Everything that mattered here happened before the shop opened.
"The POS is broken" is rarely the real problem. Lightspeed is built for thousands of SKUs, supplier and purchase-order workflows and multi-site venues. A coffee shop with a counter, a cabinet and a kitchen sits at the other end of that scale — so the fix was to move, not to keep configuring.
We do not have a house point-of-sale platform we push at everyone. It runs on an iPad, the reporting answers a café's actual questions, the pricing is flat-rate with no lock-in — and, the deciding factor, the catalogue is simple enough that the owners can change it themselves.
We exported the product list out of Lightspeed and brought it into Square rather than re-typing it, then cleaned it on the way through: duplicates merged, discontinued lines retired, naming made consistent, pricing corrected item by item, and variations rebuilt so a flat white with oat is one item with an option rather than four separate buttons.
The till layout was built around the things that sell most, in the fewest taps. A second iPad went into the kitchen as a display screen. The changeover ran on site and outside trading hours, so the shop opened on the new system the next morning.
A POS changeover looks like a hardware job and is really a catalogue job. These are the services that did the work — each one is a page you can read.
Setup, catalogue, hardware and staff permissions — configured to trade fast at the counter.
The platform Willow & Co. run on today: an iPad at the till, a card reader, a receipt printer and a menu the owners maintain themselves.Square POS setup →Choosing between Square, Lightspeed and Shopify POS honestly, based on how you actually trade.
We do not have a house platform we push at everyone. The comparison is the service, and sometimes the answer is to stay where you are.Compare POS platforms →Still the right answer for deeper retail and multi-site hospitality — we set that up too.
Willow & Co. moved off it because a single-site café sits at the simple end of the scale. A larger venue is often better off the other way round.Lightspeed POS →Installation and changeover work done in the shop, scheduled outside trading hours.
The switch happened overnight so the shop opened on the new system the next morning rather than learning it in front of a queue.On-site support →The iPads at the counter and in the kitchen — supplied, set up and supported by an Apple Authorised Reseller.
Familiar hardware with no proprietary terminal to work around, and a spare screen is a walk down the street rather than a procurement exercise.Apple at EduCom IT →580 Dean Street — the store this job walked out of, and the one that supports it.
Willow & Co. and our Albury store are on the same street, which is why this one started as a walk-in rather than an enquiry form.Visit our Albury store →
Hot drinks, teas, four alternate milks, three syrups, milkshakes, smoothies, frappés and a juice list that is "any combination of" eight things. Behind the boards that is hundreds of sellable combinations, and in the old system each one had drifted into its own button.
Rebuilding it properly in Square — items with variations and modifiers instead of a wall of separate products — is what made the till fast and what makes a seasonal menu change a five-minute job for the owners rather than a support ticket to us.
Once the catalogue was clean, the screen was laid out around the morning: the things that sell most, where a thumb already is. The result is a till a new staff member can be shown in a few minutes rather than trained on over a week — which, in hospitality, is worth more than almost anything on a comparison chart.
The second half of the job was the part the customer never sees. One more iPad in the kitchen, same platform, same account, nothing new for anyone to learn — and the counter got faster because the kitchen stopped being interrupted.
Willow & Co. have been trading on it since July 2024. The system has stayed out of their way, which is the highest compliment you can pay a POS.
Yes. We export the catalogue out of the old platform and import it into Square rather than re-typing it by hand, which is both faster and far less error-prone. The migration is also the best opportunity you will ever get to clean the catalogue up — duplicates, discontinued lines and inconsistent naming all get dealt with on the way through instead of being carried across.
Neither is better; they are built for different businesses. Lightspeed is designed for depth — thousands of SKUs, supplier and purchase-order workflows, multi-site retail and hospitality. Square is designed for speed and simplicity at the counter. Willow & Co. moved because a single-site coffee shop with a short menu sits at the simple end of that scale, and they were paying in day-to-day overhead for depth they never needed. A larger or more complex venue would often be better off the other way round.
Usually less than people expect. An iPad on a stand at the counter, a card reader, a receipt printer and a cash drawer will run most cafés. Square also sells its own dedicated hardware — Square Terminal and Square Register — where a business would rather not run it on an iPad. We work out what is genuinely needed rather than quoting the full catalogue.
Yes. Willow & Co. have a second iPad mounted in the kitchen as a kitchen display system, so orders appear on screen the moment they are taken at the counter. It removes the paper docket and the calling-out, and both ends of the shop are looking at the same list.
Your historical sales stay in the old platform's reporting, not in the new one — so the time to export the reports you want to keep is before the old subscription lapses, not after. We take care of that as part of the changeover. Reporting in the new system starts from the day you switch.
Most of the work is in the catalogue, not the hardware. We prepare and clean the product list up front, set the new system up alongside the old one, then switch over outside trading hours so the shop opens on the new system the next morning. The counter team are normally up to speed within a shift.
Yes. Willow & Co. are a short walk from our Albury store, which is why that one was a walk-in job, but we set up and support point-of-sale systems for businesses across regional NSW and the ACT from our Albury, Batemans Bay, Canberra, Coffs Harbour and Smeaton Grange locations, and remotely elsewhere.
Tell us what it is doing to your mornings. We will tell you honestly whether it is the platform or the way it was set up — and only recommend a move if it is the platform.