Credit or Debit?

When you grow up in your family’s business, it feels more like home than an actual business.  It’s a hard feeling to describe.  There’s just a familiarity about it.  Every once and awhile, we’ll do something that seems pretty upscale.  It’s something you’d find at a big corporation and I feel like we’re a real business, not just something my family built.

That’s how I feel about this little improvement that I installed in the clubhouse the other day.  Our new computer system has the ability to have forward facing terminals like what you see at Wal-Mart, Target, Hy-Vee, Fareway and the like.  Businesses that I would consider to be much bigger than my own.  I’ve had my eye on getting these terminals for about a year but they were in a beta mode, so I had to wait.

It’s official.  The wait is over.

The terminals arrived in a big box and I was super excited to get them out of their packaging.  The incredibly un-fun portion of the job was getting them set up.  This required me to attach something to a wire, so I could send the flimsy wire through the hole in our cabinets.  I’m sure they make something just for such a purpose.  I don’t own that, so I just attached a pencil to the wire.

Then, I had the honor of climbing under the cabinet to send the wiring up through the small hole in the counter top.  This all goes back to my title of Wizard of Fun.  I truly get all of the fun jobs.

Kim waited patiently above the cabinets for the pencil to appear.

When I first tried, we had a miss.  Kim was able to get the pencil, but the wire had fallen off.  Our second try equaled success.

Once I had this set up, I had to move on to the other two computers to spend additional time stuck inside of a cupboard.  Then, it was time to call tech support, so I could get all of the drivers installed for these devices.

I was on the phone long enough that my ears hurt by the end of the day.  Nothing was super difficult.  It was just somewhat time consuming to get each machine set up.  We’re pretty excited about these machines because we will be able to save a lot of money in credit card charges from our merchant service.  These machines allow us to take debit cards.  There is a very small fee to a business to take debit cards, but it goes up significantly when it’s a credit card.  In our old system, we could only run everything as a credit, so our fees were much higher than they will be with this machine.  Plus, we’re able to offer cash back at the register if the golfer is interested AND more importantly, I don’t have to keep thousands of receipts with signatures.  It’s all stored in the system.   It’s a win/win all around.

Our merchant service also had me create four images that rotate on the screen of each terminal.  Talk about upscale!

We were all giddy school girls when our first golfer walked up to the counter after I officially had everything installed.  I asked him if I could take his picture for the blog.  I think he thought I had fallen off my rocker.  You can see that his hand is a blur from swiping his own card through our machine!

Yeah for technology!  In the words of Napoleon Dynamite’s brother.  I love technology.

Tell me.  Am I the only one who has to do some crazy things to get computer systems up and running correctly?