Point of Sale POS

A point of sale is the moment and the place where a customer pays. In a shop that is the counter with the screen, the cash drawer and the receipt printer, while on a website it is the checkout page. People shorten it to POS and use those letters for both the moment and the machine.

The job is small but it has to be exact. The till needs to know the price of what the customer is holding, add it up, take the money in whatever form it comes and print or send proof. It also tells the rest of the shop what just left the shelf, so the stock number drops by one.

That last part is what separates a real point of sale from a cash drawer, because a drawer only holds money. A point of sale keeps a record too, so it knows what was sold, at what price, by which member of staff and when. It also knows whether the money came in as cash, on a card or from a phone wallet. That is why the owner can compare the drawer each evening with what the system says should be there, and the gap between the two is 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, and some keep working when the internet drops and send the sales up later. That matters in a market where the connection comes and goes. So when we build one for a shop, the first questions are simple: how many people serve at once, is anything sold by weight, and what happens when a customer brings something back.

Price changes are the quiet test of any 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 round with a printed list instead, it is not, and that is worth asking before you buy rather than after. Linkysoft asks it first when scoping a shop system, because the answer usually decides whether the work is a small web application or a much larger one.