Point of Sale POS

A point of sale is the moment and the place where a customer pays. In a shop it is the counter with the screen, the drawer and the receipt printer. On a website it is the checkout page. People use the short form POS for both the moment itself and the machine that handles it.

The job is small but exact. It has to know the price of what the customer is holding, add it up, take the money in whatever form the customer offers, and print or send proof. It also has to tell the rest of the business what just left the shelf, so the stock number goes down by one.

That last part is what separates a real point of sale from a cash drawer. A drawer only holds money. A point of sale keeps a record: what was sold, at what price, by which member of staff, at what time, and whether it was paid in cash, by card or by wallet. Each evening the owner compares the money in the drawer with the money the system says should be there. The difference is a number worth looking at.

This is why Storek counts stock at the moment of sale rather than overnight. Modern systems run on a tablet as happily as on a till. Some work offline and send the sales up later, which matters in a market where the internet drops. When we build one for a shop, the first questions we ask are simple ones. How many people serve at once. Do you sell by weight. And what happens when a customer wants to bring something back.

Price changes are the quiet test of a system. If a shop can change one price in one place and see it on every till and on the website at the same moment, the software is doing its job. If someone has to walk around with a printed list, it is not. That is a question worth asking before you buy, not after. When Linkysoft scopes a shop system it asks it first, and the answer usually decides whether the job is a small web application or a much larger one.