Up 'n go Pay at Table

This morning, we announced our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 financial results. Highlights include: System-wide sales of $1.2B Total revenues increased 13.9% year over year Opened 50 system-wide restaurants across 19 states Thank you to our more than 15,000 employees who wake up early every day to Make Days Brighter for our customers and each other. These results are the product of their extraordinary efforts. For our full Q4 and FY2024 results and definitions: https://lnkd.in/eKeTM54r #FWRG #FirstWatch #DaytimeDining #earnings

Up 'n go circa 2019. What happens around 5:30pm at my desk? Somehow I end up in my Apple Photos app going down memory lane. I stumbled across this alternative QR code option we've always been able to provide, but almost never did... except back in the day at Cali BBQ, where we used to test lots of things! This here is referred to as a "chit." It's a printout specific to a check, but not the actual check. There are no printed line items or totals. A server could leave this at the table anytime during the dining experience and the guest(s) can scan any time to see what's on their check and pay without even asking the server for the check first. What's nice about this compared to the static QR codes some competitors put on tables, is that it goes directly to your check, won't end up displaying the check from the wrong table, and it can't be hacked. (One risky bet you take with static QR codes on tables is that fraudsters can replace them with alternative, malicious static QR codes to capture your money instead of you, but I digress...) Practice makes perfect, they say, but it also trends you towards one way of doing things. After 25 million people have paid with Up 'n go in thousands of restaurants, some things have become the standard approach, such as printing our dynamic QR codes on checks, and so we don't take these fun diversions. I still think chits are a great QR payment option for restaurants!

7 powerful features of QR payments, totally missing from handhelds! Handhelds are an important tool because you'll always need the ability to accept physical credit cards, but it's advantageous to also have QR code payments, and to have staff promote QR payments over handheld payments. Here's why: You get all the benefits below from QR payments that you don't get from handheld payment devices: ★ BOOST YOUR GOOGLE REVIEWS: When someone pays on their phone, you can give them one easy click to leave you a Google Review. On their phones, many users are already logged into Google and will do it. Google Reviews are known to drive more business to your restaurants. ★ GET MORE LOYALTY SIGNUPS: When a guest pays on their phone, you can redirect them to sign up for your loyalty program, where the info you want like name, email, phone, can quickly auto-populate. Why have a loyalty program and then take payment in a way that prevents signups to your loyalty program? ★ FOLLOW YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA: When a guest pays on their phone, you can expect more Instagram followers. Who doesn't want more followers? ★ DOWNLOAD YOUR APP: This may seem funny since QR payments like Up 'n go don't require an app, but that makes it easier for more people to use, and then you can display a link to download your app after paying ★ BUILD YOUR EMAIL MARKETING LIST: Did you know that when a guest pays with Apple Pay or Google Pay, Up 'n go automatically gets their verified email addresses from Apple & Google and gives them to you? In contrast, when a guest taps their phone to use Apple Pay on a handheld device, that DOES NOT give you their email address. ★ REDUCE CHARGEBACKS: You heard me right, you can get fewer chargebacks with CARD NOT PRESENT. Why is that? BIOMETRICS and 2FA. In order for a guest to pay Up 'n go with Apple Pay or Google Pay, they have to prove their identity. Think about it this way: If someone loses their phone and you find it, you can't use it to pay. However, if someone loses their physical credit card and you find it, you can use it to make purchases. There's less protection with physical credit cards. ★ LESS SERVER TIME AT THE TABLE: With QR codes, it's drop and go. Your guests do the work, and servers are off taking more orders and providing more hospitality. With handhelds, your server is still there for payment. Many restaurants are paying servers $12 an hour, which is 20￠ per minute. If it takes a server two minutes to stand there and swipe two cards for a party, you paid 40￠ to your server to take payment. If you have 200 payments a day, that's $29,200 a year that you're paying servers to stand there and take credit cards. Would you rather spend that money on some other initiative?

What does it mean to be the best pay at the table solution? Some restaurants believe that "good enough" is "good enough." Lucky for them, there are many Up 'n go copycats. Many copycat QR code pay at table solutions lack what may seem easy but is a very technically complicated feature: split the check. Split the check for QR code payments gets complicated because you take what is normally a serial process and make it parallel. What do I mean by that? Here's what I mean: When a server splits a check, or when a tablet or handheld is used to split the check, you take payments serially, meaning one payment after the other. In this model, which is the old model, you are safe. The balance due is always adjusted before the next payment is tendered, so you always know exactly how much is due for the next person to pay. When you put splitting the check in the hands of multiple guests and the server at the same time, suddenly the paradigm restaurants have had for splitting the check for decades is turned on its head! Now, you can have any combination of the server or however many guests at the table all trying to make partial payments at the same time! These payments are being made in parallel. The challenge here is that you are throwing multiple partial payments at the POS at the same time and the POS doesn't have a chance to recalculate balance due before each payment. You could have an issue where if you add up all the inbound partial payments, the check would get overpaid. What does the typical POS do with an overpayment? Typically, it rejects it, which actually means money lost. (Don't worry, we fixed that problem a long time ago.) But what happens if guests are not doing math right and the sum of their partial payments won't add up to the whole amount due? Well then you could end up with a check that is not fully paid. Enter our newest feature: Underpayment prevention! Using a series of algorithms we've created, we can detect when a partial payment is most likely to be the last payment, but also that the guest is not trying to pay enough! When we detect such a situation, we now prompt the "last" guest to pay more. When you select a pay at the table provider that does nothing but pay at the table, like Up 'n go, you get a company that goes deep to solve every problem, and not one that does it by simply stripping features. This feature is now live on Up 'n go!

Afraid that QR code payments mean more chargebacks? There's no need to fear with Up 'n go! Once again, I'm excited to share the tremendously low chargeback rates that we've achieved for our restaurant partners collecting payment with Up 'n go. Below you'll see aggregate transaction volume for several Up 'n go restaurant locations for the month of October. This payment volume is 100% Up 'n go. How do we achieve this? We've invested years in proprietary technology to detect early warning signs of fraudulent payments. Additionally, we've integrated multiple third-party systems that leverage extensive databases of payment and consumer history and behavior analysis to augment these capabilities. In short, we apply many years of pay at table experience to reduce chargebacks. Industry standard chargeback rates can be as high as 12 bps for card present transactions, and we're coming in 6x better for QR code payments!

Who pays by phone? This is something we're frequently asked at Up 'n go. Sometimes, potential restaurant partners will say something like: "We don't get many young people in our restaurant, so we don't think this is for us." Well guess what... 42.2% of restaurant guests who pay at the table with their phones are over 45 years old. This proves that it's not just "the younger generations" that want to pay by phone. Restaurant guests of all age groups appreciate the convenience of paying on their own phones. They like taking control of their time, they like using secure payment methods stored on their phones, and they like splitting the check fairly. If you want to invest in your restaurant's digital guest experience, adding the convenience and security of QR code pay at table is something your guests of all ages will both use and appreciate!

Want to throw your gift card sales into OVERDRIVE this holiday season? Turn every time a guest pays a check at the table into an opportunity to sell more gift cards. When guests pay at the table with Up 'n go, we can beautifully promote the sales of your gift cards. This is what we put together for one of our long-standing restaurant partners, Turning Point Restaurants. This is not something you can do when you run credit cards to the terminal, or even with EXPENSIVE handheld devices. This is another powerful feature of putting payment on your GUEST PHONES, where they can easily click and take an action you want, like buying your gift cards.

Our first ever Black Friday sale! New clients save 50% off our already low $399 activation fee, making it only $199 to get started with Up 'n go! This holiday season is going to be busy! You don't want people walking away because your wait is too long. Let guests pay by QR code and turn your tables 15%+ faster. You can add thousands of dollars to your holiday sales with Up 'n go!