When the POS goes down: a 20 minute triage order

A register that will not take a card turns every customer into a cash customer, and most of them are not carrying any. The ones who are buy less, because a cash basket is capped by what is in the wallet rather than by what someone wanted. The clock matters, so the order of operations matters. Work it in this sequence and you will either fix it or hand a technician something useful inside 20 minutes.

Minute zero: keep selling

Before any diagnosis, protect revenue.

1. 1Decide what you can still take and tell the floor in one sentence, so nobody improvises. Cash, and whatever your processor's backup path is. A kitchen that keeps cooking while the front decides is a kitchen throwing food away.
2. 2Post the cash-only sign you should already have printed and laminated in the office drawer. Put it at the door, not only at the register. A customer who finds out at the counter leaves annoyed and empty handed; one who finds out at the door visits the ATM.
3. 3Tell staff the manual card procedure your processor supports, whichever of phone authorization or an offline capture path applies to you, and where the paper is.
4. 4Note the exact time. You will need it for the ticket and for the reconciliation later.

Practice this once a quarter with a shift lead. A business that has rehearsed cash-only for ten minutes loses half as much as one discovering it live at seven on a Friday.

Minutes one to three: scope the failure

Answer three questions before touching anything, because they eliminate most of the tree:

• Is it one terminal or all of them? One terminal points at that station, its cable or its card reader. All of them points at the router, the switch or the host.
• Is it cards only, or everything? If cash sales ring fine and cards do not, the terminal is healthy and the problem sits between your card reader and the processor.
• Does anything else on that network work? Open the online-ordering tablet, the back-office computer or the guest wifi on your phone. If they are all dead, this is a circuit or a router problem and your POS vendor cannot fix it.

Minutes three to eight: power, cable and network

• Check the UPS. Batteries last three to four years, and a dead UPS can brown out a terminal or a switch into a hung state while every light on the front still looks normal. If it is beeping or showing a fault, move the load to a known-good circuit and note it for replacement.
• Look at the switch. Dark or amber link lights on the terminal's port tell you more than any error message on screen.
• Look at the cable, physically. The run between a counter terminal and the switch gets rolled over by a chair, crushed by a shelf leg, pinched by a till drawer or unplugged by whoever last cleaned behind the counter. Reseat both ends and watch the link light. A cable tester is $30 and settles the question in a minute.
• Look at the modem or router WAN light. If it is down, tether a phone and test whether the outside world is reachable. An ISP outage is a phone call to the ISP, not a service call.
• Check whether anything changed. A menu or price push, a software update that landed overnight, a new device someone added to the network, or a firewall change made remotely is the cause far more often than a coincidence.

Minutes eight to fifteen: read the actual error

Write the error text down word for word, including any number. "Host not available" and "communication error" send a technician to different places. "No host" on the card reader points at the payment path. A tamper message on a card reader is not a fault you clear, it is a device you replace, so keep one spare in the safe if your processor allows a swap.

If a reboot is warranted, the order matters or you will do it twice:

1. 1Network gear first: modem, then switch. Wait 90 seconds between.
2. 2Any back-office server or on-site POS controller next. Give it a full boot cycle, which can take several minutes. Do not interrupt it.
3. 3Terminals last, one at a time.

Rebooting terminals before the network gear is the most common wasted ten minutes in the trade.

Minute fifteen: call the right number

If cash rings and cards do not, call your payment processor before your POS vendor. If nothing rings at all, call the POS vendor. If nothing on the network reaches the internet, call the ISP. Have this ready on a single card taped inside the office door:

• POS vendor support number and your account or store ID
• Processor support number, merchant ID and terminal IDs
• ISP account number and support number
• POS software version, and the model of any back-office server
• A photo of the network rack or wall plate with each cable labeled
• Who holds the admin credentials, with at least two people who can reach them

An outage where the only person with the admin password is on a flight is a self-inflicted wound. Store credentials in a password manager a second manager can also reach.

What repairs cost

Per part, installed, not a whole-job band.

• Card reader or pin pad replacement: $350 to $900 depending on model and encryption program
• Register terminal: $1,200 to $2,600
• Back-office server or POS controller board: $800 to $2,000
• Network switch or router: $200 to $700
• UPS: $180 to $600
• Re-terminating or replacing one data run: $150 to $400, more where it crosses a finished ceiling
• Labor: $140 to $220 an hour, with after-hours callouts of $180 to $300

Work your own outage cost rather than trusting a figure off a page like this one. Take an average hour of sales, multiply by your gross margin, multiply by the hours you expect to be down, then take off whatever share of customers genuinely come back later. A restaurant doing $600 an hour at a 65 percent gross margin, down four hours on a Friday and losing half its covers, is out about $780. Substitute your own numbers. The answer is almost always larger than the spare card reader you did not buy and the UPS battery you did not replace.

After the outage

Close the loop the same week. Reconcile the manual transactions, confirm every offline capture cleared, and read the ticket the technician left. If the same fault appears twice in ninety days, escalate past the front line and ask for the root cause in writing. Repeat outages on a payment path are almost always a configuration or a hardware item that somebody keeps resetting instead of replacing.