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Point Of Sale Systems


sonnyk

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Hello all,

We will be opening up our Distillery (KO Distilling) this May with a Tasting Room, Tours, Merchandise, and direct sales of our distilled products to our visitors, along with sales to VA ABC to get some of our products on their shelves.

We are currently using Quick Books for our Accounting SW and I just started reviewing QB POS and other POS systems such as Square and IPad based systems (both HW and SW) to try to determine a good fit for the company (to include Inventory Management and integration with our Accounting System).

I would appreciate any insight you can provide into the pros and cons of the POS Systems you are using.

Thanks, John O.

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We use ShopKeep as well. We are reasonably happy, but not fully so. It does not properly handle our county liquor excise tax (only allows a single, although varying, flat or percentage, but not independent tax lines that would allow a combination of flat excise with percentage sales). It allows inventory but makes it hard to move from one inventory category to another from the POS (for example, moving from retail package inventory into raw goods for bar stock). This is in the environment of a retail bar/shop that has both package sales and full bar for cocktails. On the other hand, price is right.

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  • 2 weeks later...

SonnyK, I'm with you on this. POS systems are kind of a mystery to someone who hasn't run a cash register in 20 years. People didn't have debit cards then, let alone NFC chips.

After seeing this thread I contacted ShopKeep. They were very helpful. Without scanners it would cost around $1200 to get started and then $50 per register monthly. Not bad at all.

Square charges for hardware but the app is free and there's no monthly charge. Transaction fees are 2.75% though. At that rate it will take about $3000 in sales before you would have broken even on the ShopKeep system. Too steep.

Clover and POS are on the agenda to research. They're probably all pretty good with no real dud among them.The matter of ongoing costs is the big one.

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Oh, one thing to keep in mind - the US switches to EMV this October. That means merchants must be able to accept Chip & Pin / Chip & Sign cards or they're on the hook for all fraud. All these iPad-based swipe readers become useless...

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Oh yeah. Good point. ShopKeep has an EMV compliant reader available now. Square says they'll have one available this spring. Thanks, sir.

Both of these systems allow you to track inventory & employees, too.

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We are looking at Shopkeep for our tasting room also. We have an existing PC based POS system that we would be switching from. Did any of you have to switch inventory over from another system (manually or through a CSV file)? Thoughts on the switch-over?

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  • 1 month later...

We are having one major issue with Shopkeep. If you allow employees to close their own shift at the end of the day, they are also allowed to void and voids are not track able at this point. This makes it possible for employees to void a transaction if paid in cash and you have no way of knowing.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Oh, one thing to keep in mind - the US switches to EMV this October.

That means merchants must be able to accept Chip & Pin / Chip & Sign cards or they're on the hook for all fraud. All these iPad-based swipe readers become useless...

Australia went to chip and pin last year. Paypal has a chip reader that links to tablets, i-pads and smartphones. Bluetooth connection occasionally misbehaves.

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  • 10 months later...

Resurrecting thread now that we're in an EMV world. Had lunch yesterday at a BBQ joint that used Square. They had the chip reader but the clerk said it was a nightmare. He had to pull and reinsert my card about 6 times before it took.

What's everyone's experience with their POS systems and chipped cards?

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