The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place where a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant would calculate. Votes resets to zero every month. There are currently 18621 sites in our database. Time until reset: 0 days, 5 hours and 32 min. Welcome to eAuditNet. Most comprehensive people search on the web in one place for free! BE SURE TO SEE OUR NEW PAGE ON TOP BAR. Coming soon, How to make yourself invisible on the Web.

Point of sale - Wikipedia. Points of sale at a Target store.

The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place where a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant would calculate the amount owed by the customer and indicate the amount, and may prepare an invoice for the customer (which may be a cash register printout), and indicate the options for the customer to make payment. It is also the point at which a customer makes a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods or after provision of a service.

After receiving payment, the merchant may issue a receipt for the transaction, which is usually printed, but is increasingly being dispensed with or sent electronically. To make a payment, payment terminals, touch screens, and a variety of other hardware and software options are available. The point of sale is often referred to as the point of service because it is not just a point of sale but also a point of return or customer order. Additionally, current POS terminal software may include additional features to cater for different functionality, such as inventory management, CRM, financials, or warehousing.

Businesses are increasingly adopting POS systems and one of the most obvious and compelling reasons is that a POS system does away with the need for price tags. Selling prices are linked to the product code of an item when adding stock, so the cashier merely needs to scan this code to process a sale. If there is a price change, this can also be easily done through the inventory window. Other advantages include ability to implement various types of discounts, a loyalty scheme for customers and more efficient stock control. Terminology. This is particularly the case when planning and designing the area as well as when considering a marketing strategy and offers. Some point of sale vendors refer to their POS system as .

In August 1. 97. 3, IBM released the IBM 3. IBM 3. 65. 3/3. 66.

This system was the first commercial use of client- server technology, peer- to- peer communications, local area network (LAN) simultaneous backup, and remote initialization. By mid- 1. 97. 4, it was installed in Pathmark stores in New Jersey and Dillard's department stores.

One of the first microprocessor- controlled cash register systems was built by William Brobeck and Associates in 1. Mc. Donald's Restaurants. Each station in the restaurant had its own device which displayed the entire order for a customer — for example, .

By pressing the . When the customer was ready to pay, the .

This made it accurate for Mc. Donald's and very convenient for the servers and provided the restaurant owner with a check on the amount that should be in the cash drawers. Up to eight devices were connected to one of two interconnected computers so that printed reports, prices, and taxes could be handled from any desired device by putting it into Manager Mode. In addition to the error- correcting memory, accuracy was enhanced by having three copies of all important data with many numbers stored only as multiples of 3.

Should one computer fail, the other could handle the entire store. In 1. 98. 6, Gene Mosher introduced the first graphical point of sale software. This was the first commercially available POS system with a widget- driven color graphic touch screen interface and was installed in several restaurants in the USA and Canada. In 1. 98. 6, IBM introduced its 4. POS equipment based on Digital Research's Concurrent DOS 2. Flex. OS 1. xx, a modular real- time multi- tasking multi- user operating system.

Modern software (post- 1. The availability of local processing power, local data storage, networking, and graphical user interface made it possible to develop flexible and highly functional POS systems. Cost of such systems has also declined, as all the components can now be purchased off- the- shelf. In 1. 99. 3, IBM adopted Flex. OS 2. 3. 2 as the basis of their IBM 4.

OS in their 4. 69x series of POS terminals. This was developed up to 2. Toshiba, who continued to support it up to at least 2.

As far as computers are concerned, off- the- shelf versions are usually newer and hence more powerful than proprietary POS terminals. How To Update Your Bios Asus. Custom modifications are added as needed.

Other products, like touchscreen tablets and laptops, are readily available in the market. And they are also more portable than traditional POS terminals.

The only advantage of the latter has is because they are typically built to withstand rough handling and spillages; a benefit for food & beverage businesses. The key requirements that must be met by modern POS systems include high and consistent operating speed, reliability, ease of use, remote supportability, low cost, and rich functionality. Retailers can reasonably expect to acquire such systems (including hardware) for about $4.

US (as of 2. 00. 9) per checkout lane. Reliability depends not completely on the developer but at times on the compatibility between a database and an OS version.

For example, the widely used MS Access database system had a compatibility issue when Windows XP machines were updated to a newer Windows OS. No solution was immediately offered by Microsoft. Some businesses were seriously disrupted in the process, and many downgraded back to Windows XP for a quick resolution. Other companies utilized community support, for a registry tweak solution has been found for this.

Many POS systems are software suites that include sale, inventory, stock counting, vendor ordering, customer loyalty and reporting modules. Sometimes purchase ordering, stock transferring, quotation issuing, barcode creating, bookkeeping or even accounting capabilities are included.

Furthermore, each of these modules are interlinked if they are to serve their practical purpose and maximize their usability. For instance, the sale window is immediately updated on a new member entry through the membership window because of this interlinking. Similarly when a sale transaction is made, any purchase by a member is on record for the membership window to report providing information like payment type, goods purchased, date of purchase, points accumulated.

Comprehensive analysis performed by a POS machine may need to process several qualities about a single product, like selling price, balance, average cost, quantity sold, description and department. Highly complex programming is involved (and possibly considerable computer resources) to generate such extensive analyses. POS systems are designed not only to serve the retail, wholesale and hospitality industries as historically is the case. Nowadays POS systems are also used in goods and property leasing businesses, equipment repair shops, healthcare management, ticketing offices such as cinemas and sports facilities and many other operations where capabilities such as the following are required: processing monetary transactions, allocation and scheduling of facilities, keeping record and scheduling services rendered to customers, tracking of goods and processes (repair or manufacture), invoicing and tracking of debts and outstanding payments. Different customers have different expectations within each trade. The reporting functionality alone is subject to so many demands, especially from those in the retail/wholesale industry. To cite special requirements, some business's goods may include perishables and hence the inventory system must be capable of prompting the admin and cashier on expiring or expired products.

Some retail businesses require the system to store credit for their customers, credit which can be used subsequently to pay for goods. A few companies even expect the POS system to behave like a full- fledged inventory management system, including the ability to provide even FIFO (First In First Out) and LIFO (Last In First Out) reports of their goods for accounting and tax purposes. In the hospitality industry, POS system capabilities can also diverge significantly. For instance, while a restaurant is typically concerned about how the sale window functions, whether it has functionality such as for creating item buttons, for various discounts, for adding a service charge, for holding of receipts, for queuing, for table service as well as for takeaways, merging and splitting of a receipt, these capabilities may yet be insufficient for a spa or slimming center which would require in addition a scheduling window with historical records of customers' attendance and their special requirements. It may be said that a POS system can be made to serve different things to different end- users depending on their unique business processes. Quite often an off- the- self POS system is inadequate for customers; some customization is required and this is why a POS system can become very complex. The complexity of a mature POS system even extends to remote networking or interlinking between remote outlets and the HQ such that updating both ways is possible.

Some POS systems even offer the linking of web- based orders to their sale window. Even when local networking is only required (as in the case of a high- traffic supermarket), there is the ever- present challenge for the developer to keep most if not all of their POS stations running. This puts high demand not just on software coding but also designing the whole system covering how individual stations and the network work together, and a special consideration for the performance capability and usage of databases. Due to such complexity, bugs and errors encountered in POS systems are frequent.

The immediacy required of the system on the sale window such as may be observed at a checkout counter in a supermarket also cannot be compromised. This places much stress on certain enterprise databases if there are just several tens of thousands of sale records in the database. Enterprise database Ms SQL for example has been known to freeze up (including the OS) completely for many minutes under such conditions showing a .