Re: pos hardware information

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Interestingly, two of our core team members (myself being one) have
working experience with POS software.  Currently, there isn't a lot of
work in this area because we want to restructure underlying portions
of the application first.  Most of what is being done is done by me
because my customers pay me to do it.

However, here are a few things to consider when getting a POS system:

1)  Every POS system out there is subtly different from a workflow
perspective.

2) Every single instance I have ever seen for small businesses
(commerically or otherwise) is poorly engineered (LedgerSMB currently
included).    This includes every commercial product I have evaluated
for small businesses as well as every open source project I have
reviewed.  Sorry, all software in this area currently sucks.

3) The only two things you should look at evaluating at the moment are
data robustness (LSMB is reasonably good here), and support for your
specific workflow (LSMB works well for convenience stores and
light-weight retail, and fails miserably at anything else).  These two
points address both integrated and add-on solutions and should set
expectations accordingly.

We intend to build and facilitate the building of quality POS modules
once LSMB 1.3 is out the door (this depends largely on re-engineering
the financial side of the application and so cannot be done
effectively at the moment).   Because of the new architecture, POS
terminals could run as ncurses or GUI database clients on the terminal
and this would simplify a great deal of things relating to hardware
support (current approach to hardware support is a real hack and
probably not maintainable in the long run).

Here are a few outlines of challenges in POS software which often get ignored:

1)  POS software needs to always be responsive and FAST regardless of
the load on the system (lag of less than three seconds may be
tolerable or not depending on the environment).  This is one system
you can't afford to see slow down.  If your accounting system takes 20
seconds to load a new screen for an invoice, that is a problem but is
not urgent.  If your POS terminal takes 20 seconds to start a new
invoice, you have a major problem.

2)  Workflows need to be minimized to provide FAST operation of the
system.  The operator needs to be FAST too.

3)  This is business-critical financial data you can't afford to lose
(it is irreplaceable).  If you lose a day's worth of data, your cash
controls go out the window for that day too (cashiers could steal
money and you would never know)!  This is a *big* problem with most
commercial offerings.

4)  Cash controls in this area are somewhat different from what they
are in typical accounting processes.

5)  Credit card processing requires compliance with PCI-DSS and
related standards.

In general LSMB is sufficient to meet the needs of *some* businesses
in this area.  Longer-run, we hope that the POS modules will be
re-engineered and moved out of the main package so that we can build
quality modules beyond light-weight retail.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers