A till knows what left. It rarely knows what arrived.
Point of sale is half a system. The other half is everything that happens before the sale: what you ordered, what turned up, what it cost by the time it reached the shelf.
You will recognise at least two of these
None of them mean you chose badly. They mean the business got bigger than the tool.
Purchasing lives outside the till
Orders go to suppliers by phone or WhatsApp and come back as a delivery note somebody signs. The till finds out when a cashier adjusts a count.
Landed cost is the invoice price
Freight, clearing, transport to the second shop: real money that never reaches the item, so the margin the till reports is better than the one your bank account saw.
The back room is invisible
The register counts what is under the counter. Stock in the store, in transit to the other branch, or reserved for a booking is somewhere else, or nowhere.
Two shops means two accounts
Each site keeps its own catalogue and its own prices, and consolidating them is a monthly export-and-paste rather than a screen.
What actually changes
The left column is not a straw man. It is what the tool is for. The right is what a system built around stock does instead.
| Side by side | a till on its own | Stocked |
|---|---|---|
| Selling at a counter | This is what it is for, and it is good at it | Offline-capable registers, shifts, cash drawer counts, thermal receipts |
| Buying | Usually absent, or a stock-in screen | Purchase orders, supplier terms, part receipts, returns to supplier |
| What an item costs | The last price you typed | Landed cost, with freight and clearing spread across the delivery |
| More than one site | Often a separate account per shop | One catalogue, stock per location, transfers with in-transit tracking |
| Non-counter sales | Rings through the till or not at all | Invoices, online, phone and bookings on the same stock figure |
| Reporting | Sales reports | Sales, margin, sell-through, dead stock and money tied up in it |
In fairness
Some tills are better tills
A dedicated point-of-sale product may have hardware, card terminals or a payment relationship we do not, and if that is the part holding your day together, keep it. Plenty of businesses run their counter on one thing and their stock and purchasing on another. What you should not do is run the counter on one thing and guess at the rest.
How the move actually goes
There is no cutover weekend, because there is nothing to cut over. You run both for a week, and then you stop typing into the old one.
Export what you have
Items, prices, suppliers and current counts, as CSV. Every system on this list can produce one, and if yours cannot, a photo of the notebook page has been enough before.
20 minutes
We map your columns
Send the files and we return a loaded workspace: your names, your SKUs, your suppliers, your locations. There is no charge for this on any plan, including the free one.
One working day
Count once, on a quiet morning
Opening counts are the only part nobody can do for you. Print the count sheets, walk the shelves, key in the variances. It is the last time your figures will be a guess.
A morning
Run both for a week
Keep the old system open and updated. Nothing here writes to it, so the week costs you double entry and nothing else, and it ends with two sets of numbers you can hold against each other.
A week
Stop updating the old one
That is the cutover. There is no switch to throw and no downtime, because the day you stop typing into the old thing is the day you have moved.
A decision, not an event
Questions we get from people on a till on its own
Can I keep my current till and still use this?
Often, yes. If it exports sales as CSV or has an API, sales can land here and draw down stock. It is more work than using the registers built in, so we will tell you plainly which way is less trouble for your setup.
Will my existing hardware work?
Receipt printers and cash drawers from the common Star and Epson families are supported, and any barcode scanner that behaves as a keyboard just works. Card terminals stay whatever they are today.
Does the till work without internet?
Yes. Sales queue on the register and sync in the order they rang. That is a first-class path, not a degraded mode. It is designed around the assumption that the line will drop mid-service.