Point of sale
The counter sells from the same catalog and the same stock as your storefront. A sale at the till and a sale on the web are the same kind of order, differing only in how they are paid and that nothing gets posted.
Choosing a register location
A register belongs to a location, and that is the shelf it sells from. This is the single most important setting at the counter: it decides which stock goes down when something is sold.
A till on the shop floor sells the shop floor's stock. Ninety-eight units in the warehouse are no help to the person standing at the counter, and the register will say so.
Scanning
Scan a barcode and the variant is found and added. If nothing matches, you are told the barcode is unknown rather than being given a blank line. You can also search by name or SKU.
Stock
Availability is checked when the item is scanned, and again when payment is taken. If the other till sold the last one in between, the sale is refused at that point rather than overselling.
Stock comes off on hand immediately on payment. There is no picking step: the customer is walking out with it.
Price overrides
A staff member can charge a different price, and doing so requires a reason: price match, damaged item, staff discount, manager approval, clearance, or other. Choosing "other" requires you to say what you mean.
Three things are kept on the line: what was charged, what the ticket said, and who overrode it. Without all three an override is untraceable, and untraceable discounts are how counter shrinkage happens.
Payment
Cash — enter what was handed over and the change is worked out. Less than the total is refused, with the shortfall named.
Card — three ways, and you choose per sale:
- Tap to Pay on a supported iPhone or Android phone, with no extra hardware.
- A Stripe reader bound to the register's location. The till tells the reader what to charge and the sale closes itself.
- Your own machine. Take the payment on the terminal you already have and record it here with a reference. Nothing is charged through us, so this is a record of what your machine did, not a reconciled figure — and it is kept in its own column at close of day for exactly that reason.
A tap that declines stops there: no order, no stock movement, nothing to unwind. Card-present sales carry no platform fee from us; a tap taken through Stripe is charged at Stripe's own card-present rate on your account.
Closing the drawer
At the end of a shift the register closes against the day it actually sold, not the moment you press the button — a sale rung up at 11:55pm belongs to that day's drawer even if it commits after midnight.
You enter the opening float and the counted drawer. The close reports cash, Stripe reader and manual-card takings in separate columns, the expected drawer, what you counted, and the variance — named as balanced, short or over. Separate columns are the point: an unreconciled figure from your own machine must never be added to a reconciled one and presented as a single number.
Receipts
A receipt is queued to the counter's receipt printer when the sale completes. If there is no printer, or it is unreachable, the sale still completes — a sale that fails because a printer is unplugged is a lost sale.
Returns at the counter
A POS sale can be returned exactly like a mail-order one, and through the same machinery: the sale records itself as fulfilled at the moment it is paid for, which is what makes its lines returnable.
Where to find it
Sell → Point of sale. Card readers are paired under Point of sale → Readers, and the drawer is closed under Point of sale → Close. Receipt printers are configured under Printing.