Drone POS — bank compatibility

Drone is a point-of-sale system for hospitality, built by Shift 8. A franchise specialist out of Haymarket in Sydney — built for head office, not for one café.

Certified on Linkly, running on premise. Linkly reaches more acquirers than any other middleware in the market, which is why most POS start there.

The Linkly integration runs on premise.

Shift8 started in early 2012, founded by Jonathon Britton alongside fellow directors Amy Renae, Yvette Anelli and Alden Zhou, and grew fast: more than 200% year-on-year through 2013, and roughly 700 sites nationally by early 2014 after signing New Zealand Natural, Pita Pan, Ferguson Plarre Bakehouses, Healthy Habits and Puckles in a single run. It still trades as Shift8 Pty Ltd from Cunningham Street, Haymarket.

The system was written for franchisors rather than operators, and it shows in what it does: rostering, timesheets, KPI benchmarking across sites, online cash-up and group reporting, with menus, pricing and inventory pushed from one head office out to every store. The current lineup runs POS on Windows and iOS, loyalty, online ordering, reporting and analytics, Android and iPad kiosks, and Shift8's own payments product. It is also an integration partner for me&u's order-and-pay.

One thing to check before you quote a Shift8 site: Drone is the certified build name, but Shift8's own site does not use it — the products there are branded plainly as Point of Sale and the rest. Ask which version the venue is actually running before assuming the integration behaves the way the certification says. Note too that Shift8 sells payments itself, so you may be quoting against the vendor rather than an acquirer.