In this new blog series, our very own Jef from Sales and Ian, our Solutions Architect, better known as Thelma & Louise, take you along on their retail road trips. They meet shop owners, managers, and cashiers, listen to challenges, and share insights on industry trends and innovative cash management solutions. Names of companies are changed (to protect the innocent… and for a bit of fun), but the stories are real.
Episode 1 – The Day We Met the Master Bakers
This week’s stop: the charming bakery “Bake it Easy” – a place that smells like heaven and operates with the speed of a Formula 1 pit crew. Croissants flying into bags, cappuccinos steaming, and the tills constantly ringing.
But behind the buttery, flaky magic, there’s a less sweet reality: cash loss. And not just a few missing coins here and there, the loss was substantial. With so many transactions, the risk of counting errors, shrinkage, and mismatched floats was sky-high.
When we sat down with the bakery’s management, they told us they’d been looking into cash recyclers. On paper, these machines promised to tackle the cash-handling problem.
But then came the reality check:
- Heavy investment cost – need to sell a lot of buns to afford it
- Extensive maintenance – the kind that comes with a service contract and needs specialist visits
- Shopfitting work – the counter has to be modified to fit the units.
- Loss of precious counter space – and in a bakery, that often means losing the window display where the pastries do all the heavy marketing.
That’s when we brought out our secret weapon — smarttill®.
Instead of re-engineering the entire shop layout and investing in heavy machinery, smarttill offered a simpler, leaner, and much smarter solution:
- Automatic cash counting with every transaction.
- Instant visibility of cash differences.
- No big counter redesign needed — it fits in the existing till point.
- Lower total cost of ownership compared to recyclers.
The bakery’s team instantly saw the value — keep the pastries in the window, keep the shop flow the same, but take back control of their cash.
As we left (with a bag of warm rolls, purely for research, of course), we knew this was a classic win: the right solution, at the right time, with a healthy dose of practicality. And if you would like to know about the ROI? Well, as their cash loss was so high, the investment to install smarttills in 40 shops will be returned after 1 month already! This is particularly fast, as typically, our customers report an ROI within 9-12 months.
