IT support for El Paso retail stores and restaurants
TechBit Solutions keeps El Paso retail stores and restaurants trading: point of sale networks, a backup internet connection that takes over on its own, guest wifi that cannot reach the tills, and a phone answered in minutes.
What retail and restaurants call us about
TechBit Solutions supports retail stores and restaurants around El Paso, from single locations to small groups.
The calls are nearly always the same shape: something has stopped and customers are standing there. The card terminal will not connect. The tills are offline. The kitchen display has gone dark. The wifi is down and the online orders have stopped arriving.
What we support
- Point of sale hardware and the network it runs on
- Payment terminals and their connections
- Kitchen display and order systems
- Back-office systems: stock, scheduling, payroll and accounting
- Guest wifi, kept separate from everything that matters
- Cameras and the recording behind them
- Music, menu screens and anything else customer-facing
- Connectivity across multiple locations
When the point of sale goes down
For most businesses an outage is an inconvenience. For a restaurant at seven in the evening it is a queue at the door and a dining room that cannot be billed.
Two things reduce that risk and neither is exotic. The first is a second internet connection that takes over automatically, which for a business taking card payments usually pays for itself the first time it is needed. The second is knowing in advance what the manual process is, so the shift has something to do other than apologize.
Card data and PCI
Any business taking card payments is subject to the PCI security standard. Most small merchants meet it through an annual self-assessment questionnaire, and most fill it in optimistically.
- Payment systems on their own network segment, away from guest wifi and the office
- Default passwords changed on every device, which is the most commonly failed requirement
- Patching on anything in the payment path
- Access limited to staff who need it, with individual logins rather than a shared manager code
- A record of the above, so the questionnaire can be answered honestly
Our compliance support page has more.
Guest wifi done properly
Guest wifi should be a service you offer customers, not a door into your business.
Done properly it sits on a completely separate network, cannot reach the payment systems or the back office, has its own bandwidth limit so a customer streaming video does not slow the tills, and does not use a password printed on a card that has been the same since 2019.
Multiple locations
Running several sites is where small operators lose the most time, usually to doing the same thing repeatedly in different buildings.
Managed centrally, a menu change, a price update or a security patch happens once. Each site still needs to keep trading if its own connection drops, which is a design decision rather than an expensive one.
Getting started
We start with a visit during trading hours, because that is when the problems are visible. See wireless networks and managed IT services.
Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888.
Questions we get asked
Do you support our point of sale system?
We support the network, the hardware and the connection it depends on, and we take the call when it goes down. Where the fault is inside the vendor's software we work with them directly.
What is PCI compliance and does it apply to us?
PCI DSS is the card industry's security standard, and it applies to any business that takes card payments. For most small merchants it means completing an annual self-assessment questionnaire and meeting the requirements in it. Your card processor will tell you which version applies to you.
Can guests use our wifi safely?
Yes, provided guest wifi is genuinely separate from the network your payment and back-office systems sit on. That separation is the single most important thing to get right, and it is frequently missing.
We have four locations. Do they each need their own everything?
No. Most of it should be managed centrally so a change happens once rather than four times, with enough local resilience that one site losing its connection does not stop it trading.
How fast can you get to us if the tills are down?
Call and we will tell you honestly. We answer in minutes and we are in El Paso, so somebody can be on the road rather than scheduled for tomorrow.