Your counter: supermarket, pharmacy, restaurant

If you chose the Supermarket, Pharmacy or Restaurant edition, your ERP is set up around a till. This chapter is the day at the counter: opening, selling, receiving a delivery, counting the shelf, closing.

Your first page

The page you land on is called Counter (a supermarket or a pharmacy) or Service (a restaurant). Across the top are today's figures, read live from your data: Counter sales today, Takings yesterday, Stock value and what is Expiring in the coming 30 days (90 for a pharmacy); a restaurant sees its takings, the month so far and the ingredients out of stock. Under them are the tiles for the daily jobs — Open the counter (Take an order in a restaurant), Receive delivery, Stock count, Close the till, Items and prices (The menu), Customers or Suppliers, the Expiry report and the Sales register. Nothing on that page changes your data; it only shows it.

Selling at the till

1. Open Open the counter — Take an order in a restaurant — (or press Ctrl+G and type Point of Sale).
2. The first time, pick the profile called Main counter. It was created for you: it sells from your Stores warehouse, at your standard prices, in cash by default.
3. Scan a barcode, or start typing an item's name and pick it. Change the quantity with the keypad. The till shows the running total with tax.
4. Press Checkout, pick the payment (cash is preselected; add cards under Mode of Payment once), enter the amount received; the change is shown.
5. Complete order saves and submits the sale and prints the receipt.

Every sale is a POS Invoice. It moves stock out and books the income the moment it is completed — there is no separate "post" step. A return is made from the same screen with Return: pick the original receipt, the refund is recorded and the stock comes back.

The receipt

Your counter prints an 80 mm receipt: your logo and name, the lines as quantity × price, VAT, the total, what was paid and the change. When your company has a VAT number the heading reads Simplified Tax Invoice, which is what a tax authority expects from a shop; otherwise simply Receipt. Both languages are on it. A business customer who needs a full invoice gets the A4 Tax Invoice from the Sales Invoice screen instead.

The receipt prints from the browser's print dialog; choose your receipt printer there once and the browser remembers it. The printer's driver sets the paper width.

Barcodes and prices

Barcodes live on the item: open the Item, section Barcodes, one row per code (most products carry one EAN-13 on the pack; add a second row for a multipack). The till finds the item by any of them. The quickest way to load a whole range is the Your data page (under Data & shop) in the control panel: download the items, prices and barcodes template, fill one row per product, upload it back. Prices come from the Standard Selling price list; change a price there and the till uses it from the next sale.

Receiving a delivery

Receive delivery opens a Purchase Receipt: pick the supplier, add the items and quantities from the delivery note, submit. Stock is on the shelf immediately. When the supplier's bill arrives, make the Purchase Invoice from that receipt (the button on the receipt) so nothing is entered twice; the owed to suppliers figure updates.

Counting the shelf

Stock count opens a Stock Reconciliation: pick the warehouse, the items appear with what the system believes; type what you counted; submit. The difference is written off or found, and the figure on your first page follows. Counting a section a week keeps the whole shop honest without a night of stocktaking.

Pharmacy: batches and expiry

Medicines are set up with Has batch number ticked, so every delivery carries a batch and an expiry date. From then on the pharmacy rule applies by itself: the till and every outward document take the earliest expiry first, the Expiring in 90 days figure on your first page counts what must leave the shelf, the Expiry report lists it batch by batch, and the daily brief names it. Use the medicines, batches and expiry template on the Data page to load a stock with batches.

Restaurant: the menu

The menu is item groups: Starters, Mains, Drinks, Desserts and Extras were created for you. File each dish under one of them and the till shows the groups as tabs, the sales register groups by them, and the brief tells you the best-selling group. Rename or add groups freely under Item Group.

Tables. The till has no table box, but it always has a customer box — so the tables are customers: Table 1 to Table 12, Takeaway and Delivery were created for you in the group Tables. Pick the table as the customer when you take the order; the receipt and the kitchen ticket print it, and the sales register can group by it. Rename or add tables under Customer, keeping the group Tables.

The kitchen ticket. Every order can print a second slip with no prices — the table, the time, who took it, and the dishes by category in large type. From the till, open Recent orders, pick the order, Print → choose Kitchen Ticket; from an order's page, the printer icon offers the same. And it prints by itself: when the till is set to print the receipt on completion (it is, for a restaurant), the kitchen ticket follows the receipt the moment an order is completed, and the order summary has a Kitchen button to print it again. Choose the kitchen printer in the print dialog once and the browser remembers it — allow pop-ups for your ERP's address, since each print opens in its own window.

Staff at the till

A cashier does not need an email address. In the control panel, Users → Add till staff: type their name and a short sign-in name (say sara), and a password is made for you — write both on a card. At your ERP's login box they type the sign-in name where it says "Email Address" and the password below. They can sell, open and close the till and see customers; they cannot reach the accounts or the settings. Lost the card? New password on the Users page makes another; Deactivate ends their access the day they leave. Every till login counts as one of your plan's users.

Egypt: e-receipts

A shop in Egypt must report every counter sale to the Tax Authority as an e-receipt. Your ERP does it by itself once it is set up: in the control panel, My business → E-receipts. You need three things from the taxpayer portal: your registration number, your branch code, and a registered POS device (its Client ID, Client Secret and serial number). Press Prepare, then Connect. From then on each completed sale is reported the moment the receipt prints, and the receipt carries the Tax Authority's number at the bottom.

One thing only you can do: the Tax Authority must know your products. Prepare gives every item a code made of EG, your RIN and the item code, such as EG-123456789-TEA01; register those codes in the taxpayer portal (GS1 barcodes work too — put the GS1 code on the item instead). Until a code is registered the Tax Authority rejects receipts for that item; the E-receipts page shows each submission and what came back.

Closing the till

At the end of the day, Close the till opens a POS Closing Entry: it lists the day's sales by payment method against what you counted in the drawer, and submits them into the accounts as one batch. Then the daily brief the next morning tells you how the day went — and, if you set it up on the WhatsApp page, it arrives on your phone.