Bringing Digital Payments to a 200-Year-Old Bar!

Mason's Bar is a 200-year-old family owned pub idyllically placed in the wilds of Downpatrick in Northern Ireland. When we were asked by a friend and business connection could we have an inventory system, point of sale and payments set up in less than 10 days in his family's pub we relished the chance to test ourselves!

If you're in Northern Ireland you'll know the name Martin Gilchrist. He'll tell you that he's an accountant but really he's an innovator, raconteur and the single best business networker you'll ever meet!

And so of course when Martin was thinking about the possibility of reopening his family's 200-year-old bar he did what no-one else would do, he set up a networking event called What Should We Do With Mason's Bar? And then he called in the cavalry!

He needed an experienced barman to operate the pumps and who better than Michael Stewart the Bar Czar (and now Belfast's Night Czar also) and the vision behind Common Market one of Belfast's best loved food and drink venues in the Cathedral Quarter.

With Michael providing a steady hand on how to run the bar, Martin called on us at AirPOS Pay to get a point of sale and payments setup parachuted in and with only ten days to go until the event to boot!

The to do list was rapidly pulled together:

• Get an AirPOS account set up
• Get the Stripe account set up for AirPOS Pay and approved for payments
• Get a stock-take done and the inventory into the AirPOS system
• Get the hardware ordered, installed and operational
• Get the barman trained and using the system

And of course it's the unknowns that stop you in your tracks. When we get there we realised that the bar has no internet (everyone thought it did!) but thankfully we came prepared with a Three mobile router in case of this eventuality!

By 7pm we had the pumps flowing (thanks to Michael) and digital payments being taken for the first time in 200 years. Michael told us how impressed he was with our system and the ability to take fully integrated card payments with no double entry on the card reader and point of sale, no faint praise from the Bar Czar himself with more than 30 years experience in operating hospitality venues! And Martin left us this wonderful review too https://uk.trustpilot.com/reviews/666384e5c5a49070dba91d09

Look out for our AirPOS Pay case study video on Mason's Bar soon.

Thinking of modernising your pub, bar or club? Talk to us about simplifying your setup and busting those queues with AirPOS Pay's fully integrated point of sale payments solution. Contact us here