We hope you enjoyed pleasant holidays and a happy Easter. The Easter Bunny has been very busy at our place — and we're delighted to introduce our big update to Version 5.0 of our bessa Kassa.
🎯 Highlights at a Glance
bessa Zahlen — Our own, fully integrated payment solution
Through our many integrations with card-payment providers, we've identified plenty of room for improvement — especially around NFC payments via mobile-app solutions — and decided to build our own fully integrated solution.
The very popular NFC payment on the cashier device is built directly into the Kassa software. There are no separate logins, updates, or version dependencies — just tap "Pay" anytime to settle smoothly.
External card terminals follow a similarly seamless concept. Terminals are shipped pre-configured for the customer or can be paired afterwards via a simple pairing code. From there you only connect them to the network/Wi-Fi and you're ready to go. No more tedious configuration of fixed IP addresses and network routes — the terminal only needs an internet connection and doesn't even have to be on the same network. Kassa and terminal find each other automatically.
On pricing, we placed ourselves competitively in the middle of the field at 1.2% + €0.14 per transaction (standard debit and credit cards). For comparison, ready2order is 1.23%, SumUp 1.39%, GPTom also 1.39%, and Stripe 1.5% + €0.25 (source: each provider's website at the time this update was shared). An additional cost advantage: no extra licensing fee is charged for integrating a card terminal with our solution.
Order Management in the Web Kassa
Managing orders from the desktop is a frequently requested feature, so we've extended the Manager with order management. The new Web Kassa lets you create and manage quotes. With just one click you can convert a quote into an order, and an order into an invoice. Quotes, orders, and invoices can be filtered by status, customer, and other criteria for an ideal overview.
Order management integrates seamlessly with reporting and customer management. The Web Kassa is not yet fiscalised, so invoices can currently only be settled by bank transfer.
This module renders quotes, orders, and invoices as proper A4 invoices. As a side benefit, you can now also retrospectively download invoices from other Kassa devices as full A4 invoices and send them to customers.
Workflow Optimizations for Payment and Re-Booking
Of course we've also looked at existing processes in the POS system and optimized the most important workflows to make them even faster.
To speed up payments, the two primary payment methods — usually cash and card — are now always shown as dedicated, directly selectable buttons. This eliminates the frequent payment-method switching at checkout. Less frequently used methods remain available behind their own button.
Table search during re-booking has also been significantly improved: you can enter the table number directly or filter by open or free tables, table groups, or rooms. This makes table lookup much clearer and considerably faster.
Hello Germany — TSE/DSFinV-K Preparations
Over the last few months we've also extended our POS system to support TSE and DSFinV-K — somewhat more complex than Austrian fiscalisation — and are now ready for the German POS market.
We're of course getting this certified and are currently in the final phase of the certification process with CaseWare, the audit-software vendor used by German auditors. This guarantees our 100% conformance with German requirements.
bessa Signieren — Automatic Certificate Management
Managing signature certificates is often more complex than expected. Besides limited validity and the resulting need for renewals, other factors come into play — as the recent security incident affecting certain signature cards has shown. To avoid these issues and manage everything for you automatically and worry-free, we've moved to an online signature service that lets us create, renew, and revoke certificates automatically. Compared to other providers, this solution offers an impressive capacity of currently 20,000 signatures per month, and it eliminates additional hardware that could also fail. You no longer need to worry about your signature creation unit.
Currently we can offer this integration for Germany only. Expansion to the Austrian market will follow shortly.
Integration of the New Hobex POSit Interface
As you may have heard, Hobex has once again completely replaced the software system behind their NFC app solution and is launching with a new app. We've now connected the new app solution to our POS system as well, so we support both the old and the new Hobex POSit variants.
All update details: