What should a venue expect from out-of-hours IT support?

Cover during the hours you actually trade, which for most venues means evenings, weekends and public holidays. A support agreement running nine to five covers your quietest hours and leaves the expensive ones uncovered, which is the most common mismatch in hospitality IT arrangements.

It is worth being blunt about the economics. A point of sale failure at eleven on a Tuesday morning costs some inconvenience. The same failure at seven on a Friday evening with a full room costs the sitting, the goodwill and quite possibly some staff patience. Any support arrangement should be priced against the second scenario, because that is the one it exists for.

That does not automatically mean paying for staffed cover at every trading hour. Many venues are well served by monitoring plus a defined escalation path for genuine trading emergencies, with agreed criteria for what warrants a call. The essential thing is that this is settled in advance and known to the duty manager, rather than being worked out by someone holding a phone during service.

The other half is what staff can resolve themselves, and a single laminated page does more work than most operators expect: restart this, check whether the backup connection has engaged, here is the manual process, ring this number for the payment terminal and that one for the network. Written with the people who work those shifts rather than for them, it resolves a meaningful share of incidents in the first two minutes. If you want cover arranged around your trading hours, call 1800 456 567.