Point of Sale machines

Verres

(Sorry if this is in the wrong place - I was unsure where to put it)

I was wondering if anyone has any experience of using PoS machines in retail?
Specifically, I am wondering how the stock Increment / Decrement part of the sale happens.

Is it a case whereby the barcode scanners, in addition to displaying the price and item on the PoS machine, also decrement some sort of stockroom database that is maintained in the background? If so, is this done realtime, over the in-shop network or would it be done at End of Day via batch file?

There is probably no hard and fast set of rules and I imagine that it changes from establishement to establishment, but if there was a general set of guidelines or a "generally accepted" way of setting up these systems I love to know.

Also - I was searching around on the web and I didn't find any authoritative sources for how these things work. If anyone had any good links, that would be most appreciated.

RGDATA!

On the one I've used, which is based on a Microsoft Access database, the system interacted with the database in real time for stock purposes - i.e. immediate decrement when item sold.

There is a certain amount of functionality tied in to end of day Z reads - i.e. information about sales made today will not show up in reports until I do the Z read at the end of the day, but the stock level for each item was always current.

hope this helps

Verres

That's great - thanks! More or less what I guessed: a mix of realtime and batch file processing.

I'll wait to see if anyone else has any info or links.

congo_90

used one called navision was tailor made to suit the needs. a simple barcode scan and you could track a specific item to a position or pos. eg query stock numbers in real time from warehouse etc even your returns. it I think we used navision 5 and 3.7. live feeds on screens were available too for at a glance to track items.

hope this helps somewhat.

Verres

It does - thanks.

I think I'll just approch the shop in question and ask them if they want to discuss it with me... I've got a project in mind so they'd be guinea pigs.

Thanks all