It is half time at a stadium bar. Twelve terminals are firing at once, the queue is four deep at every one of them, and the whole rush has to clear in eleven minutes. That is the moment SwiftPOS was built for, and it handles it. Out of Newcastle and now part of the Oolio group, SwiftPOS runs everything from one cafe register up to a fifty thousand seat venue, and it owns the Australian club and events end of the market.
The venue SwiftPOS was tuned for
Look at what their own material spends its detail on and you can see the customer they had in mind. Stocktakes done at the register as well as the back office, counted by scanning barcodes. Manager control on voids and returns, with reasons enforced on cancels, credits and no sales. Shift levels so one product sells as a single, a six pack and a carton. Member points accepted as payment on OrderAway, their own ordering product.
That is a till built by people who have stood behind a bar during a grand final. If you run a licensed club with member pricing, three bars and a function room, SwiftPOS belongs on your list, and an owner who already runs it has good reason to be happy.
Twelve terminals, one price change
Tap beer goes up fifty cents. On the terminals, SwiftPOS does this properly. You change it once in Back Office and the registers take it, all twelve of them, because central control across many tills is the problem the product was designed around. Their ordering product builds its menu from the same items, so that side follows too. Credit where it is due.
The trouble starts the moment a change has to leave SwiftPOS. Do your trading hours for the Cup Day Monday. The tills know. Your booking diary does not, because bookings are not what SwiftPOS is for, so the diary is a separate product with its own hours screen and its own login. Your website needs telling. Google needs telling. Four places, one fact, and the one you forget is the one that takes a booking for a day you are closed.
Then a new casual starts on Friday. You add her to the rostering tool you bought separately. Then again as an operator on the till, so she can actually sell something. Then again to whatever holds the timesheets that feed her pay. Three entries, one person, and she has not poured a beer yet.
Then a member of eight years changes her phone number. It is now right in SwiftPOS and wrong in the diary, wrong in the marketing tool, and wrong on the note stuck to the office wall. Every one of those jobs is five minutes. Five minutes, several times a week, forever, plus the weeks somebody forgets and a customer is the one who finds out.
The other end of the range
SwiftPOS is a point of sale and an ordering product, and it says so plainly. Bookings are not what it is for. Neither are notes, preferences and allergies on a guest record, nor segments such as regulars and lapsed, nor email campaigns, nor rostering and timesheets. For a stadium that is fine, because a stadium has a marketing department down the corridor. For one suburban venue, each of those is a product you choose, buy, set up, pair to your hardware and teach two staff to use, on your own time, after close.
Four cheques a month, and one you cannot price yet
SwiftPOS does not publish pricing, so you cannot compare anything without booking a call and waiting for a proposal. Then you do it again for the diary, the marketing tool and rostering. Month one is hardware, an install and a first subscription. By month twelve it is three or four subscriptions, none of which shrink, and three or four support numbers to ring while you work out which one is broken.
Allvio publishes its numbers in Australian dollars, so you can do that sum tonight. Complete is $399 per month ex GST for one location, plus $299 per month for each extra location, and it switches every app on with no per user charge. If you only want a couple of the apps, Build your own starts at $20 per month per app. Hardware is sold outright at $1,499 ex GST for the single station, $1,869 for the retail station and $2,499 for the restaurant station. The trial runs 30 days and needs no card. The same subscription also covers your invoicing, payroll and the books.
SwiftPOS | Allvio | |
|---|---|---|
What you are actually buying | A high volume till and an ordering product, built to run many registers at once | One AUD subscription covering the till, ordering, bookings, marketing, rostering and the books |
Changing a price or a menu item | Handled well across the tills and the ordering menu. The diary, the website and the marketing list are separate products to update | Changed once, and the till, the ordering page and the diary all show it |
Changing your trading hours | Set on the tills, then again in whatever you use for bookings, then on your site | Set once, and the ordering page and the booking diary both respect it |
Keeping a customer's details right | Member records live in SwiftPOS. A diary and a marketing tool each keep their own copy | One contact record keyed on email and phone, with dedupe and merge |
Taking a booking | Not what the product is for. A second product to choose, buy and set up | Booking diary, waitlist, walk ins, deposits and branded reminders included |
Emailing your regulars | Not what the product is for. A third product, with its own list to keep current | Email and SMS campaigns off the same customer record |
What you pay before your first sale | Hardware, an install and a first subscription, then a second and third for the parts it does not cover | Hardware outright from $1,499 ex GST, and a 30 day trial with no card |
Working out what it will cost you | Not published. You need a sales call before you can compare anything | Published in Australian dollars on our own site |
Best fit | Clubs, stadiums, events and multi venue franchise groups running many registers with member pricing | A single location owner who is also the bookkeeper and the marketing department |
Saturday, six o'clock, the front bar
A couple who have come in every second Saturday for two years walk up. Does the person on the till know that? Does anyone know it is their anniversary, that they always take the window table, that they have spent thousands here? Or are they a name that appears when a card taps and vanishes when it leaves? At a stadium nobody expects to be known. In a neighbourhood venue, being known is most of what you sell.
If you are running a club or an events business
Then take SwiftPOS seriously and probably pick it. For member pricing across several bars, for tiered accounts, for events where forty terminals open at once and close together, its depth is real and Allvio does not match it. A club with staff for each part of the business is the buyer SwiftPOS earned.
If you are one venue, one kitchen and one owner who does the roster on a Sunday night, the question is not which till is faster at half time. It is how many nights a week you spend typing the same fact into a fourth screen, and which regular finds out first the week you miss one.
This comparison reflects each product's general positioning as published by each vendor in August 2026. Features and pricing change: always check directly with each vendor before deciding.