Background
The Washington Athletic Club is one of Seattle's most prestigious private clubs, serving its members with world-class dining, events, and hospitality. Each year, the WAC hosts Jubilee - its flagship holiday gala and the biggest event on the club's calendar. Jubilee activates the WAC's entire footprint, with roughly a thousand members and guests flowing through multiple bars and event spaces across the building. It's a multi-night affair, often running Friday and Saturday back-to-back, and the club entrusts it with only the systems and partners it has full confidence in.
As a member-owned club, the WAC holds itself to a high standard: every experience should be seamless, every dollar accounted for, and every member treated as an owner - because they are.
The challenge
Before FastBar, the WAC's event payment infrastructure was a patchwork of disconnected systems. On any given Jubilee night, bartenders were simultaneously managing:
- A credit card POS for card transactions
- Resort Suite terminals for member account charges at some bars
- Paper chit sheets at other bars, where bartenders manually wrote orders, tallied totals, and collected signatures
- A cash drawer for cash payments
- Drink tokens redeemed at the bar, purchased by guests at a separate staffed station elsewhere in the venue
Each system required its own workflow, its own reconciliation, and its own set of problems. Wi-Fi instability caused the POS to drop transactions. Paper chit sheets meant manual math at every interaction. The token system required dedicated staff at a separate purchasing station and added yet another item for bartenders to accept and track at the bar. And when the last bar closed at 2:00 AM, the real work began.
They're usually there until 3, 4, sometimes 5 or 6am in the morning - just reconciling those numbers so that everything is good.
Management had to count all the cash, log every chit sheet, reconcile every token, tally every credit card batch, and cross-reference every member charge - a manual process that stretched three to five hours past closing. And with Jubilee running on back-to-back nights, the team would finish reconciling in the early hours of Saturday morning and then have to come back and do it all over again that evening.
The complexity wasn't just an operational headache - it was costing the club revenue. With bartenders juggling five systems in a small banquet bar setting, transactions inevitably slipped through the cracks.
The solution: FastBar
Amy Kendall had seen FastBar in action at a local industry event and knew it could simplify the WAC's payment operations. When she joined the club as Director of Catering and heard firsthand about the challenges, she brought FastBar to the table.
The transition was smoother than expected. The WAC already used wristbands at Jubilee to identify member categories - members, guests, VIPs, and Cloud Room ticket holders - so integrating FastBar's RFID wristband-based payment system fit naturally into existing operations.
The club replaced all five payment systems with a single FastBar point of sale. Bartenders went from managing multiple devices, paper sheets, and cash drawers to simply pressing buttons and tapping wristbands. The entire transaction flow was reduced to making the drink and processing the payment in less than a second.
The speed of service now basically boils down to how fast they can make the drinks - because it's so easy to press the buttons and have it ready. That's it.
Staff and members adapted quickly. For Jubilee, the WAC moved to a cashless model with RFID wristbands - and despite initial concerns, the club received almost no pushback. The speed and simplicity far outweighed the change. For smaller events where members prefer to pay by card, member number, or occasionally cash, FastBar handles all three seamlessly.
FastBar's ability to operate fully offline was another critical factor. The WAC had experienced firsthand how Wi-Fi instability could cripple a traditional POS mid-event - with FastBar, transactions process regardless of connectivity, keeping lines moving even in the busiest moments of the night.
Key results
100%
Revenue increase
The revenue increase was not driven by price increases - pricing remained largely the same. The difference came from speed and simplicity. With FastBar, transactions take less than a second. Lines move faster, guests don't hesitate to grab another drink when there's no wait, and bartenders can focus entirely on making drinks instead of wrestling with multiple antiquated systems. The streamlined process also ensured every transaction was properly captured - with the previous multi-system setup, the sheer complexity meant some sales inevitably slipped through the cracks under pressure.
- Before FastBar (2023)
- ~$20,000 in event sales
- With FastBar (2024)
- ~$40,000 in event sales
3–5 hrs
Of post-event reconciliation eliminated
With FastBar, when the event ends, it's done. The system processes all transactions automatically and reports are available in real time - no more counting cash at 4:00 AM, no more logging chit sheets, no more cross-referencing five different systems.
5 → 1
Payment systems consolidated into one
The credit card POS, Resort Suite terminals, paper chit sheets, cash drawer, and token system were all replaced by a single FastBar point of sale - freeing up staff previously dedicated to running the token purchasing station and dramatically simplifying the bartender experience.
When the event is done, it's done. FastBar processes everything automatically and the funds hit our account within a couple of days. During the event, we can watch the real-time numbers on the dashboard from our phones - that's one of our favorite parts.
Beyond Jubilee: expanding to everyday events
The success at Jubilee opened the door to a broader conversation. The WAC's smaller catering events - private dinners, receptions, member gatherings - faced many of the same challenges. While the large galas used RFID wristbands for maximum speed and throughput, the smaller events needed a different mix: member number charging, card payments, and occasionally cash - all from one streamlined system instead of many.
Previous solutions had fallen short. The club tried a restaurant-oriented handheld POS, but it simply wasn't built for the pace of event service. Designed for environments where you're closing out one check at a time, the handhelds couldn't keep up with event volume - they'd slow down and often need to restart after just a handful of transactions. The club's existing credit card POS, meanwhile, lacked member charging capabilities entirely and came at a cost that was hard to justify for the functionality it provided. So bartenders were still falling back on paper chit sheets at 30-person events - lining up slips across the bar, each labeled with a member's last name, manually tallying totals, and handing them off for next-day data entry.
FastBar's flexibility made it the right fit for both scales. For the big events: RFID wristbands and sub-second tap-to-pay transactions. For everyday catering: member number charging, card, and cash payments through the same simple interface - no paper, no manual reconciliation.
Not only does it take work off the bartenders' plates, but our catering sales coordinator isn't flipping through paper the next day, adding them up, charging them all manually. Now she can just pull the report in FastBar, export it, send it to accounting, and they post the charges. It's super easy.
Why FastBar worked for the WAC
- Simplified operations - Replaced five disconnected payment systems with one unified platform
- Speed and simplicity - Sub-second transactions meant faster lines, more throughput, and a better guest experience
- Flexible across event types - RFID wristbands for large galas; member number, card, and cash payments for smaller events - all on the same platform
- Complete revenue capture - Every transaction recorded, eliminating lost sales from system complexity
- Instant reconciliation - Real-time reporting and dashboards replaced hours of manual post-event accounting
- Customizable to the club - Features like transaction notifications were tailored to member preferences
- Dedicated partnership - The FastBar team worked closely with the WAC throughout onboarding, setup, and ongoing optimization
What staff and members are saying
The impact was felt immediately - and hasn't faded. One bartender still regularly thanks Amy on random weekdays for bringing FastBar to the club.
There's still one bartender that will say to us - on a random Tuesday - 'Thank you so much for doing this.' It was such a nightmare before with all of those systems.
The enthusiasm extends across the bar team:
I love it; this is the best point of sale system I've ever used in my 25 years here at The WAC. It is so simple!
Azeb G.Bartender, WAC The member number feature makes so much smoother of an experience for our guests, on top of the whole system being very easy to use.
Quentin G.Bartender, WAC What a slick piece of hardware that's convenient and easy to operate. The buttons all came to me very intuitively.
Tito M.Bartender, WAC The wristbands were so fast during Jubilee and Main Event, and I like that now we can rely on using it for other events too.
Josh G.Bartender, WAC
From a management perspective, FastBar has given the events team direct control over menus and reporting - without needing to pull in IT or Finance for every change.
Being able to build custom menus and separate out which products go where and at what pricing variants has been a handy new skill to have at my disposal when time is of the essence. There's no more wrangling of other departments like IT or Finance to backtrack or correct anything; just a simple interface and backend reporting system for us to see.
Member leaders and the Board of Governors took notice as well - not just of the faster lines, but of the operational improvements and revenue gains that signaled the club was running more efficiently.
Our member leaders saw the benefit when we were able to say: this also increased our revenue and ensured we weren't losing money because of complex systems. The members are the owners of the club - they want to make sure we're running well.
Would you recommend FastBar?
Sometimes you end up in a place where there's a really complex system and you just need one person from the outside to come in and say - why? Why are you doing it this way? You can change and simplify something and it's not going to ruffle feathers the way you might think. Simplifying your process is good for the employee experience, the client experience, and we've seen revenue increases on top of that.
Looking ahead
The WAC continues to expand its use of FastBar across events of all sizes. What started as a solution for the club's biggest night has become a core part of its catering and events infrastructure - from thousand-person galas to intimate member dinners.