How to Set Up Your Coffee Shop in 5 Minutes

The much revised article.

I have written this article before. It frustrated me and I kept taking screenshots of steps, only to go: “No, make it easier”, or “Why can’t it just be like that?” In the end, whilst this article has been re-written many times, I am most proud of changing the title, the 30 changed to 5.

Five minutes isn’t much, so let’s get going.

Firstly, go to www.beanpos.co.za and sign up. You only need to give it the name of your shop and your email. You will get an email, you click on the verification link, and it will ask you to enter your password, which country you are in, and if you want some demo data.

The “Demo Data” part is kinda important, based on which country you are in, it will give you all the basic products that a coffee shop needs, and it adapts it to the country you are in. So now you already have most of the products loaded, at the average price of coffee shops in your country.

But your pricing might be different, so lets quickly check that:

Under Settings > General > Coffee, you will find all your Coffees group in one screen:

It is designed to give you a quick glimpse over all your coffees, the sizes they come in, the price for each, even lets you quickly change the price of alternative milks. Important to also make sure you have the correct milk usage set, as the system will automatically adjust your stock, based on the type of milk used, and the size of the coffee.

Coffees don’t need recipes, we know what goes into the coffee, we just need to tweak it to the way you like it.

See that little yellow warning triangle on the Espresso? BeanPOS will gently nudge you if you forgot something. I forgot to set the Oat Milk price on my test account, so it is reminding me.

Next, let’s check our cups.

Here you can select which cups you want to use. We have already enabled all the cups for you, so you only have to change your default cup type.

If you offer a discount for people who love the environment and use travel mugs instead of paper cups, you can add that here. You should do that. It is the right thing to do.

Ok, almost there, let’s do the Milks.

Here you can select the milk types you offer. You can also select the default milk, that helps speed up each sale.

For each milk type that you choose to offer, we will automatically create the milk type as a product in your inventory, and link its usage to the milk type.

That is it, we are done. Everything else has been set up by default, you can tweak them later, make sure they fit you even better; but there isn’t this “starting from scratch” anxiety to worry about.

You can now start selling coffees, the menu on the left is built automatically, so even less to worry about. The coffee widget, is swiped-based, so to change it from travel mug to sit-down, you just swipe it right. Want to make it two Flat Whites, just swipe the whole widget to the right, it will increase the quantity.

Then tap on Complete Sale, and you will see default tenders that we have pre-loaded for you.

Then just complete the sale and you are done.

There, we set you up, and you did a sale, in maybe a smidge over five minutes.

You see, this is the kind of dogged approach that we need to keep fighting for. Legacy POS systems suck. They try to be generic, to kinda work for every one. When you take the different route, and say, this isn’t for everyone, this is just for coffee shops; well it kind of gives you the freedom to do things that will literally only make sense in a coffee shop. Make a widget to set your milk types? … Of course, that makes sense! Be able to show your baristas how many shots are in the queue? … Brilliant, it makes their lives easier!

Ok, that is it, go make some great coffees!

Fuck Generic.

Will