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OFF THE WIRE Continued from page 17 PAYMENT PROCESSING, STRAIGHT FROM A CAFÉ OWNER'S MIND Five years ago, Pascal Nicolas was a software manager at Dell when he decided to branch out to coffee shop ownership. Nicolas purchased Dolce Vita, a café and gelato shop in Austin, Texas, but immediately he encoun- tered a problem. "I wanted to see the sales during the day while I was on the road or at Dell," he says. "But I couldn't find a way to do that." Before long, Nicolas jumped down the rabbit hole of invention: He and two Dell colleagues resigned from the company and went to work on a transaction-tracking technology that would meet Nicolas' needs. The result is SalesVu, a mobile payment processing application that runs on iPhones and iPads. Released in August, SalesVu uses a cloud-computing system that stores information on remote servers while users access it through Internet browsers and mobile apps. While companies offering mobile payment products seem to be popping up every day, few (if any) have been created by shop owners. Nicolas may seem uniquely qualified to create such a product because of his combined retail and software experience, but the path to its creation was a circuitous one. Nicolas first employed a cash register with a credit card terminal at Dolce Vita, but the functionality and reporting were unsatisfactory. "The cash register is very complex," he says. "You have to press a combina- tion of five buttons just to do anything on it. And then the report- ing, I had to wait for the end of the month for my bookkeeper to send me all the reports." SalesVu, on the other hand, is a multi-use product that includes a point-of-sale interface for transaction processing and the cloud- based back-end that allows users to manage inventory and see sales figures. Pascal says that having that information update in real time instantly gave him more control and more data to draw from. "I realized that by getting all my sales—by employee, by product—in real time, I no longer needed a bookkeeper," he says. "I was on top of the business." Since its release, SalesVu has often been compared to another mobile processing option called Square; both products offer credit- card swiping units that affix to iPhones and iPads. Pascal says the products share some similarities, but he sees Square as more of a mobile credit card terminal than a business solution. "Square is more like, if you want to take $2 from your friend, they can swipe their card," he says. "The features that we developed are a lot more 18 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com