Adelaide business goes cash only to ‘survive’ after being plagued by tech issues

A South Australian business has announced a move to cash only after multiple system outages caused thousands of dollars in losses and left the business struggling to stay afloat.

Adelaide-based Italian dessert bar Zeppole & Co announced the move on social media earlier this month in a bid to save the business, after errors in the point-of-sale (POS) and eftpos systems caused the business to lose eight weeks worth of revenue.

“This month alone, our POS and banking app crashed eight times,” a spokesperson told 7NEWS.com.au.

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“This means we couldn’t take payments from customers, we couldn’t transfer any money or pay any bills.”

The spokesperson said problems continued to happen despite changing POS systems and even banks.

“(For example) if we did $1000 in sales, the POS would only register $35 even though it (said) it registered all the sales,” the spokesperson said.

The business, which specialises in the deep-fried pastry dish zeppole, said the POS company blamed a bad Wi-Fi connection.

“We lost around eight weeks worth of revenue,” the spokesperson said.

“For a small business, that’s a lot so our only option was to go cash only.

“These problems don’t happen when you have physical currency and we can control our money.”

The transition to cash only was supported by the majority of customers, the spokesperson said.

“The transition has been great,” they said.

“The support we have received has been amazing, and we are truly so grateful and blessed to have such amazing customers.

“Through our social media pages our customers understand that it may be a slight inconvenience for them to stop by an ATM before coming into our store, but it’s more of an inconvenience for us when we can’t pay wages or our mortgage, when we can’t pay our suppliers and, most importantly, when we don’t have access to our own money.”

Zeppole & Co said it chose to go cash only to survive but the change also eased the worry which technology issues had been causing.

“Running a business is hard, but it’s harder when all the money you make somehow disappears and no one has answers,” the spokesperson said.

“With cash only, we don’t have to worry about these things anymore.”

The business added it had “amped up” security to keep staff and customers safe amid the influx of cash.

“We hope any other businesses going through something like this follow our lead,” the spokesperson said.