There is a SumUp reader on counters all over Ireland, and there is a reason for that. It works. Tap, receipt, next customer. If your frustration is slow checkout or awkward card acceptance, SumUp solved that problem a long time ago and keeps solving it well.
So this is not a post about the reader being the problem. It is not. Resk (formerly Elyx) does not compete with SumUp on taking a card payment. We built Resk in Ireland for a different job: the money that never reaches the reader at all, and the money that got halfway there and stalled. The call nobody answered on Friday night. The deposit nobody asked for. The payment link that failed on Tuesday and was still sitting unpaid at the weekend.
What SumUp does genuinely well
SumUp's restaurant offering is built around taking card payments, running a simple POS and handling bills, tips and checkout without fuss. For a small venue that is exactly the right shape. The hardware is cheap enough to replace without a meeting. Staff learn it in an afternoon. There is no six-week rollout and no consultant.
If the job is "let people pay quickly", SumUp does that job properly. Plenty of venues need nothing more from their payments setup, and if that is you, the honest advice is to keep it and stop reading vendor comparisons.
Where restaurants still leak with SumUp
The leaks are not in the transaction. They are in everything around it.
Start with the phone. It is 7.15 on a Friday and someone rings about a table for six tomorrow. Everyone is mid-service, so it rings out. That booking, the deposit that should have secured it and the food those six people would have ordered never touch a card reader, so no payments product can even see the loss. SumUp is not built to answer calls, work out what the caller wants and turn it into a booking or an order. That is fair. It never claimed to be. Resk answers the call, checks availability against your house rules, takes the deposit and hands off to a human when it should.
Then bookings themselves. SumUp is not a booking engine, so table rules, confirmations, waitlists and no-show risk live somewhere else, or nowhere. A no-show with no deposit taken is a table you paid staff to set for an empty chair.
Failed payments deserve a precise sentence rather than a scary one. SumUp handles the acceptance side properly. What stays manual is the loop after a link fails or a guest goes quiet: someone has to notice, resend, remind, then remember to check the money actually moved. In most venues that someone is the owner, at 11pm, if they remember at all. Resk tracks failed and expired links, prepares the reminders and shows you what money is still waiting.
Stock and margin sit outside SumUp's world too. Supplier price creep, low stock, recipe costs and menu margin are not what a card reader is for.
The result is that payments become one tidy corner of the operation while the rest of the money picture lives across a phone, a diary, a spreadsheet and someone's memory.
| Capability | SumUp | Resk |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments and checkout | Yes | Yes, with deposits, links and recovery attached |
| AI voice agent for calls | No | Yes |
| Booking engine and no-show recovery | No | Yes |
| Failed-link and deposit chasing | Partial, follow-up stays manual | Yes |
| Menu, stock and supplier margin tracking | No | Yes |
| One daily operating brief for the owner | No | Yes |
Choose SumUp if
- Your main problem is accepting card payments or speeding up checkout.
- You need card readers, bill splitting, tips or a simple POS setup, and that is the whole brief.
- There is no meaningful payment chasing after the transaction at your venue. If nobody ever has to follow up on a deposit or a failed link, you do not need software for it.
Choose Resk if
- Deposits, payment links or failed payments still need a person to follow up.
- Calls happen in one place and payment chasing happens in another, and things fall in between.
- You want a clear view, every morning, of the money that should have already moved.
You do not have to rip out the reader to get there. The real question is whether accepting payment is enough for your venue, or whether the money still needs reminders, deposits and follow-up after the tap. Resk can run your payment workflows itself, but it earns its keep in the part SumUp was never designed for: keeping the payment work from going quiet.
What to measure in a 30-day trial
Do not take our word for any of it. Run Resk for 30 days alongside whatever you have now, and count three things at the end.
- Which unpaid moments were found before they became awkward conversations with a guest.
- Which reminders and payment follow-ups moved without you personally chasing them.
- How much of the payment work should simply become automatic next month.
If those numbers are small, tell us so, keep SumUp on its own and get on with your week. If they are not small, you have found a leak that has been running for longer than you think.
Where to start
The free Leak Audit is the quickest way to see the shape of it. Five quick answers. One clear number. Run the Leak Audit, or book a demo and start the 30-day trial. Either way you will know what the phone and the follow-up have been costing you, which is more than any card reader can tell you.