Everything your festival floor needs
Built for fast service, multiple outlets and a temporary site.
Tap-to-order
A grid of your products, priced and ready. Staff tap the round, take payment by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or cash, and move to the next customer. No menus to dig through, no typing.
Stock management
Load opening stock for kegs, cans, spirits, food lines and merch sizes. Every sale decrements the count live, so you can see what is running low across the site before a bar goes dry.
Multi-bar support
Run the main stage bar, the craft tent, three food stalls and the merch unit as separate outlets under one festival. Each has its own menu and till count; you see them all together.
Live takings dashboard
Watch revenue build in real time, by outlet, by till and by product. Spot your best sellers, your quiet bars and your peak hours without waiting for the cash-up at the end of the night.
Offline mode
Patchy 4G or a dead spot at the back of a field will not stop a sale. Tills keep taking orders offline and sync the moment the connection returns, so the queue never freezes.
Staff permissions
Give each person their own login with the right level of access. Bar staff sell; supervisors void and refund; managers see the numbers. Every action is logged against a name.
Saturday night at the bar
Tap a pint. Tap crisps. Pick a wine size. Take the cash. Print the receipt. Stock counts itself. Same till on a phone, a tablet or a counter screen.
Built for the field, not the high street
A festival is a shop that appears for a weekend and disappears on Monday. Your POS has to behave accordingly.
Most point-of-sale software is designed for a permanent venue: one building, a fixed counter, a reliable broadband line and staff who come back every week. A festival is the opposite. You build a town in a field on Thursday, serve thousands of thirsty people across Saturday night, and strike the whole thing on Sunday. The bars move every year. The staff are largely new. The signal is whatever the nearest mast can manage with twenty thousand phones fighting for it.
ApexGo Festival POS is built around those realities. It assumes you are running many outlets at once, that some of them will lose connection at the worst possible moment, that you are training a casual crew on the day, and that you need to know — right now, not at the post-event debrief — which bar is about to run out of lager and which one is taking all the money. It is one system for the bars, the food stalls and the merch tent, and it reports into the same ApexGo dashboard that sold your tickets.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Plenty of organisers run their tickets on one platform and then bolt on a separate, unrelated till system for the bars, which means two logins, two support numbers and two sets of numbers that never quite line up. With ApexGo the ticket revenue and the on-site revenue live in the same place, so the full financial picture of your festival is one screen rather than a spreadsheet you assemble afterwards.
Tap-to-order that keeps the queue moving
At a festival bar, speed per transaction is the whole game. Seconds saved per round is a shorter queue and more rounds served.
The selling screen is a grid of your products with clear prices. A staff member taps the drinks in the round, the total builds as they go, and they take payment in a couple of taps. There are no nested menus to navigate and nothing to type. New crew pick it up in minutes because it looks like exactly what it is: a list of things to sell and a button to take the money.
Payment is whatever the customer has to hand. A festival crowd expects to tap a card or a phone, so ApexGo takes:
- Contactless and chip card, the default for most punters.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay, for the growing number who leave the wallet in the tent.
- Cash, with a per-till count so the drawer reconciles at cash-up.
Because the order screen and the payment flow are the same on every device, you can throw an extra till onto a busy bar without retraining anyone. When a queue spikes during a headline set, you hand another member of staff a tablet, they log in, and they are selling within a minute. When the rush dies down, that device can move to a quieter outlet. The system flexes with the crowd instead of forcing the crowd to wait.
More than the bar
The same till sells food and merch, not just drinks. A burger van can run its own menu with modifiers, the merch tent can sell t-shirts by size and decrement the right stock line, and a coffee stall in the campsite can take its morning trade on the same account. It is one tool for everything you sell on site, which means one set of reports and one cash-up process rather than a patchwork of card terminals from different suppliers.
Stock and takings you can see in real time
The difference between a profitable bar and a leaky one is knowing what is happening while it happens.
Before the gates open, you load opening stock for every outlet: how many kegs behind the main bar, how many cases of cans in the craft tent, how many of each t-shirt size in the merch unit. From the first sale onwards, every tap decrements the relevant count. You are not guessing how much lager is left — you can see it, per bar, across the whole site, on one screen.
That live view changes how you run the weekend. When a bar drops below a threshold you can move a delivery before it runs dry, rather than discovering the problem from an angry queue. When one outlet is quiet and another is slammed, you can redeploy staff and tills with actual numbers in front of you instead of a hunch from a walk round the site.
Spotting variance and theft
Cash and casual staff are a fact of festival life, so the system is built to make discrepancies visible rather than to pretend they never happen. At cash-up, expected takings and expected stock are compared against the actual count and the cash in the drawer. A shortfall shows up against a specific outlet, and because every void, refund and discount is logged against a named login, you can see where it came from instead of writing it off as shrinkage.
- Per-outlet and per-till reconciliation, so variance is isolated rather than averaged away.
- Every refund, void and discount tied to the staff member who made it.
- Best-seller and peak-hour reporting, so next year's stock order and staffing plan are based on real figures.
All of this rolls up into the live takings dashboard. While the festival is running you watch revenue build by outlet, by till and by product. When it is over, the same data is the basis for your reconciliation and your planning for the next event — no exporting from three different terminals and stitching it together by hand.
Offline by default, accountable by login
Two things that quietly decide whether a festival bar operation works: it has to keep selling when the signal drops, and every person on it has to be accountable.
Connectivity in a field is never guaranteed. A mast that copes on a quiet afternoon falls over when thousands of phones pile on for the headliner — exactly when your bars are busiest. So ApexGo does not treat the internet as a requirement for taking money. Tills keep taking orders and payments offline, hold them safely on the device, and sync the moment a connection returns. The queue never freezes because a bar of signal vanished.
The other half is people. A festival crew is large, temporary and often meeting each other for the first time on the day, so loose access is a real risk. ApexGo gives each person their own login with a permission level that fits their role:
- Bar and stall staff sell and take payment, and nothing more.
- Supervisors can void, refund and reopen orders when something goes wrong at the till.
- Managers see live takings, stock and reports across every outlet.
You can set these logins up in advance, so on the day you hand a member of staff a device and they are ready. Because every action carries a name, the accountability that protects your takings is built into normal use rather than something you have to police.
One dashboard, ticketing to last orders
Festival POS is part of ApexGo, not a separate product, so it ties straight back into the platform you already use to sell tickets, season passes and merch online. The same branded dashboard that shows ticket sales in the build-up shows bar and food revenue on the night. You see the festival as one operation — pre-sales, entry scanning, on-site spend and the final reconciliation — rather than a stack of disconnected tools.
Getting started is deliberately low-risk. The Starter plan is free, the transaction fee is 1% + 10p per ticket, and there is no contract to sign, so you can build your menus, load stock and run a test sale before you commit to anything. Paid plans (Essentials at £49 a month and Pro at £99 a month) add room for bigger, busier organisers, with Enterprise available when you need it. Set the POS up once, reuse it year on year, and run your whole festival floor from a system that was actually designed for a field.
Built for festival operators
This is for whoever runs the bars, food and merch at a festival — organisers running their own outlets, and the bar and traders teams behind them. If you need fast service across many tills, real-time stock and takings, and a system that copes with a muddy field and patchy signal, it's built for you. WN7 FEST plans to run its event-day bars on ApexGo POS alongside its ticketing.
From sign-up to first round in three steps
1. Sign up free
Create a free account — the same one that runs your ticketing, so gate and bar share a dashboard from the start.
2. Build menus and tills
Set up each bar and stall with its own menu and stock, create staff accounts with the right permissions, and load it onto any phones or tablets you own or hire.
3. Serve and track live
Take tap-to-pay orders fast, keep selling even when the signal drops, and watch stock and takings update live across every outlet from one dashboard.
Free to start, no separate POS provider
Because POS shares the platform with ticketing, you don't pay for a separate provider. Start free on the £0 Starter plan; ticketing is 1% + 10p per ticket, and paid plans (Essentials £49/mo, Pro £99/mo, Enterprise for the largest) unlock the fuller POS and multi-outlet tools. No setup fee, no contract — see the pricing page, and pair this with festival ticketing software.
How ApexGo stacks up
Standalone POS systems don't know anything about your tickets, and most ticketing platforms have no POS at all. ApexGo joins them up, so gate and bar reconcile together. For how POS fits the wider picture, see ApexGo vs TicketCo and our guide to how festival POS systems work.
Frequently asked questions
What hardware do I need for festival POS?
ApexGo POS runs on standard phones and tablets you can own or hire, paired with a card reader for contactless payments — there's no need for expensive proprietary terminals.
What happens if the internet goes down mid-event?
The POS keeps taking payments in offline mode, queuing transactions locally and syncing them automatically when the connection returns — essential on a festival site with patchy signal.
Can I see takings per bar in real time?
Yes. Every till feeds one dashboard, so you can watch takings and stock by outlet as they happen and move staff or stock to where the queues and demand actually are.
What hardware and devices does ApexGo POS run on?
Any reasonably modern tablet or phone — iPad, Android tablet, iPhone or Android handset. It runs in the browser or as an app, so there is nothing proprietary to hire. Pair a Bluetooth card reader and a receipt printer if you want them, but a tablet on its own is enough to start selling.
Does it work with patchy or no mobile signal?
Yes. Festival sites are notorious for dead spots, so offline mode is built in. Tills keep taking orders and payments without a connection, hold them locally, and sync automatically when signal returns. Your stock counts and takings reconcile across every outlet once devices are back online.
How does multi-bar and multi-till work?
Each bar, food stall or merch point is set up as its own outlet with its own product menu, and can run several tills at once during peak. All outlets sit under one festival, so a single dashboard shows combined revenue while still letting you drill into one bar or one device.
Can it handle cashless or wristband top-ups?
ApexGo takes card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and cash at every till, which covers cashless service for most festivals without issuing wristbands. If you want a closed-loop wristband or stored-balance scheme, talk to us about your setup — we will tell you honestly what is supported before you commit.
How do you track stock and spot theft or variance?
Load opening stock, and every sale decrements it live. At cash-up you compare expected stock and takings against the count and the cash drawer, so shortfalls show up per outlet and per staff member. Because every void, refund and discount is logged against a login, variance is traceable rather than a mystery.
How fast is it to set up and train staff?
You can build menus and load stock in an afternoon, and reuse them year on year. The selling screen is a tap-the-product grid, so most bar staff are confident inside a few minutes with no formal training. Set up logins in advance and hand each person a device on the day.
Speed up every bar at your festival
Free to start. 1% + 10p per ticket. No contracts, cancel any time.