A customer-facing display tends to fail at the worst possible moment, which is any moment with a queue in front of it. The good news is that most faults fall into a small number of causes, and the majority can be cleared in under five minutes without anybody coming out to site.
Work through these in order. They are arranged from quickest to slowest, not from most to least likely, because during service the fastest check is always the one to do first.
Almost every display fault resolves to one of these three. Establishing which one you are dealing with takes about thirty seconds and saves you working through fixes for the wrong problem.
Check the display is powered and the power lead is seated properly at both ends. Counter mounted screens get knocked, and a lead that looks connected is often half out.
If it has power but shows nothing, check the data cable between the display and the POS terminal at both ends. Where the display draws power from the terminal itself, a loose cable will present as a dead screen rather than a signal error, which is why this gets mistaken for a power fault.
If the cable is sound, restart the POS terminal rather than just the display. The display usually initialises from the terminal, so restarting the screen alone often changes nothing.
This is the most common fault in day to day service and it is almost always a session problem rather than a hardware one. The display has lost its connection to the till session and is sitting on the last thing it was told.
Close the current sale on the terminal and start a new one. If the display picks up the new order, the connection has recovered and nothing further is needed. If it stays frozen, restart the terminal.
If it recurs on the same terminal several times a week, stop restarting it and log it. A repeating sync fault usually points to a cable that is failing intermittently or a network issue on that terminal, and both get worse rather than better.
If the display is showing items that are not on the current order, it is showing a cached or stale session and should clear when the sale is closed and reopened.
If it is showing the right items at the wrong prices, that is not a display fault. The display mirrors the EPOS, so a price error on screen is a price error in the menu, and it will be on the receipt and in your reporting too. Check the item in the back office rather than troubleshooting the hardware.
This distinction matters. Wrong items is usually a display problem. Wrong prices almost never is.
Layout problems are resolution or scaling issues and they typically appear after a screen has been swapped, moved between sites, or replaced with a different model. The display is running at a resolution the layout was not built for.
This is a configuration fix rather than a service floor one, so note which terminal and which screen model, and raise it rather than trying to resolve it mid shift.
If the order shows correctly but your promotional content does not, the display is working and the content is not reaching it. Check the content is still within its scheduled dates, that it is assigned to that site, and that any day part rules are not excluding the current time.
Content is managed centrally through the back office, so if it is missing across every site it is a scheduling problem. If it is missing at one site only, it is an assignment problem. That single check will tell you which team needs to look at it. There is more detail in the help centre user guide.
Stop and raise it if the same fault has recurred more than twice in a week, if a restart no longer clears it, if the screen shows physical damage or flickering, or if more than one terminal on site is affected at once. That last one is rarely the displays and usually the network.
Note the terminal, the site, what the screen was showing and what you had already tried. It is the difference between a fix on the first call and three days of back and forth.
Most repeat faults trace back to physical wear rather than software. Cables at a counter get pulled every time a screen is repositioned, and connectors loosen over months. Mounting the display so it does not need to be moved, and routing the cable so it is not in the way, removes a surprising proportion of call outs.
Where displays are part of the same platform as the EPOS, as they are with Redcat’s customer-facing displays, there is also no separate software layer to fall out of step, which removes a whole category of fault before it starts.