Nearly complete is one of my recent projects: setup a new store in town, in whatever ways I can help.
What it has involved, includes website, printed products (loss-leader notepads, business cards, etc), cellular network payment processing, point-of-sale payment processing and inventory and account management, plus media hardware and software, and multiple security systems and redundancy systems.
What that boils down to is: a lot of work, a large amount of little bits that all need to be collected from a dozen sources and assembled into one clean solution.
Most is not too difficult. Security system? well, the business location will have metal bars welded across the windows and doors, and security mesh wire along the warehouse door. But the cameras I’m buying will need to be placed in good locations, installed and wired to the main box, and that hooked into the network. Not so big of a problem.
But getting the point of sale software and hardware is a big confusion. Because there is a lot of unknown variables. Right now I’m struggling to find an Ingenico 3070 device, or a similar product. Also setting up the accounting is not too tricky, but the software being used is Simply Accounting, and it has no built-in point-of-sale functionality, but requires a third-party application.
So this third party application must have all the connectivity to hardware like a barcode scanner and cash drawer. Unfortunately, there is no way to test it because there is no trial version of the software.
So in a nutshell, this post is a bit of a rant (for the moment), about point of sale operations and hardware being confusing, fractured and such.
However, I have found a couple good resources out there.
http://www.possoftwareguide.com/articles/pos-accounting-integration.html
While typing this blog post, I searched for “open source pos software” and found, among others, the following:
http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/
