Spring has arrived in South Africa and with it the run in to the busiest stretch of the hospitality calendar. Restaurants, coffee shops, bars, delis and takeaway counters that traded quietly through the winter now have a matter of weeks before longer evenings, school holidays and the coastal season push covers and queue lengths back up. Towa, a South African supplier of point of sale software and hardware with twenty five years in the market, is spending September making the same case to operators around the country. The till setup that copes in the middle of winter is not always the one that copes in December, and the sensible time to sort that out is before the rush rather than in the middle of it.

Towa specialises in point of sale system software and hardware for retail and hospitality businesses, and the company works from a head office in Durban, a branch in Cape Town and an international office in Eswatini. Its software is cloud based, which means an owner can look at inventory and sales from any location rather than being tied to a back room terminal. For hospitality that difference tends to show up most sharply in the season now starting, when a single operator may be running a floor, a kitchen, a bar and a delivery channel at the same time and cannot be standing at the counter to see how any of it is going.

Why September Is the Month to Look at the Till

Hospitality demand in South Africa is seasonal in a way that is easy to underestimate until the first busy Saturday of the season. Trading picks up steadily from spring, holds through the December period and only settles again well into the new year. Venues that wait until the queues are already out of the door to review their systems end up making changes during their highest revenue weeks, which is the worst possible moment to be retraining staff on a new screen layout or waiting on a hardware delivery.

Towa's argument for a September review is a practical one. A quieter month gives an operator room to run a demo, work out which modules actually matter for the way the venue trades, get hardware installed and give staff time on the system before it is carrying a full service. It also gives time to get the menu, the modifiers, the stock items and the staff logins loaded properly, which is the unglamorous work that decides whether a busy night runs smoothly or turns into a queue of manual overrides.

Software Designed Around How Venues Actually Trade

Towa builds its offering in three parts: retail software, hospitality software and cloud back office software. The hospitality side is aimed at the ordinary realities of a service business, where transactions need to move quickly, orders need to reach the right place and the customer at the front of the queue should not be waiting on the system. The company designs the software to streamline processes so that transactions are swift and the experience at the counter or the table holds up under pressure.

The retail side covers the same ground for shops and counters, and a good deal of South African hospitality sits somewhere between the two. A deli that sells prepared food alongside packaged goods, a coffee shop with a retail shelf, or a bar that sells branded stock all need a pos point of sale system that handles both patterns without forcing the business into two separate setups. Because Towa supports retail and hospitality from the same product family, an operator running a mixed model does not have to choose one and work around the other.

The Back Office Is Where the Season Is Won

The cloud back office is the part of the Towa offering that most directly answers what a hospitality owner worries about in a busy season. It handles employee scheduling, which matters when a venue is putting on extra shifts for the season and needs to know who is working when without rebuilding a spreadsheet every week. It also carries in depth sales analytics, so an operator can look at what is actually selling rather than relying on a feeling about it.

That reporting is the difference between reacting and planning. A venue that can see which dishes, drinks and day parts are carrying the takings can order stock to match, staff to match and price to match. A venue that cannot is buying on instinct into its most expensive trading weeks. Because the back office is cloud based, an owner with more than one site, or an owner who is simply not on the premises, can check any of it from anywhere with a connection.

Hardware Built for a Counter That Never Stops

Software is only half of a working till. Towa has partnered with Senor Tech since 2009 on an all in one touch pos system designed for exactly this kind of environment. The design is built so peripherals attach easily and so the unit can be maintained without a specialist visit for every small issue, with after sales support behind it.

The range covers the connections a hospitality floor actually needs, including printers, scanners, scales, video and menu boards. For a takeaway counter that means kitchen printing and a menu board driven by the same system. For a deli or a bakery it means scales that talk to the till rather than a separate weighing station and a staff member typing numbers across. For a restaurant it means dockets landing where they should when the floor is full. These are small things individually, and collectively they are the difference between a service that flows and one that jams.

Rental Packages for Operators Watching Cash Flow

The obvious objection to upgrading before a busy season is the cost of doing it at exactly the moment a business is also buying stock. Towa makes all of its packages available on a fixed cost rental basis starting from R999 per month, which is aimed at operators who would rather not put capital into equipment ahead of their heaviest trading period. The company positions the rental route specifically at businesses that are short on start up cash, including new venues opening into the season.

A fixed monthly cost also makes the number easy to plan around. An owner budgeting for spring and summer knows what the system costs every month rather than facing a single outlay, and the rental covers software and hardware together rather than leaving the two to be sourced and matched separately.

Support, Demos and Where to Find Towa

Towa runs a support portal for existing customers and keeps a team of retail and hospitality specialists available for demonstrations and for questions about how the system would fit a particular business. Offices are open Monday to Thursday from 8am to 5pm and on Friday from 8am to 4pm.

The KZN head office is at 9 Fairways Avenue, Mount Edgecombe, Durban. The Cape Town office is at Black River Park, 2 Fir Street, Observatory, where the company offers walk in demonstrations. Towa also works through an international office, Swazi Cash Register in Eswatini. Operators anywhere in South Africa can reach the team on +27 87 474 8692 or at [email protected].

Venues weighing up their options for the season ahead can find full details of the software, the hardware range and the rental packages on the Towa website at https://www.towa.co.za/.

About Towa

Towa Data Systems is a South African provider of point of sale software and hardware for retail and hospitality businesses, celebrating twenty five years of trading. The company supplies retail software, hospitality software and cloud based back office software covering employee scheduling and sales analytics, alongside all in one touch POS hardware developed with Senor Tech, a partnership held since 2009. Packages are available on a fixed cost rental basis from R999 per month. Towa operates from a head office in Mount Edgecombe, Durban, a branch at Black River Park in Observatory, Cape Town, and an international office through Swazi Cash Register in Eswatini.

Media Contact
Towa
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +27 87 474 8692
Website: https://www.towa.co.za/