A day at the till

A register has to be introduced to your store once. Until it is, the app opens on the pairing screen and there is nothing else it can do.

You generate the code in the back office and type it on the till. Both halves are needed, which is the point: a device cannot join your store on its own.

The register shows the people assigned to its branch. Tap your name and type your PIN. Nobody's PIN can be read back by anybody, including you — it can only be replaced from Users & roles.

Wrong PINs are counted, and the message says how many attempts are left. After that the account is locked for a while and a manager is told.

You cannot sell without an open shift. Count the money that is physically in the drawer at the start and type it in — one figure per currency the drawer takes, each counted in its own currency.

If what you counted differs from what carried over, the difference is recorded and the manager is told. It is not blocked. A shift you left open — a crash, a power cut — is offered back to you to Resume shift. A shift somebody else left open can be joined on a shared drawer, or force-closed by a supervisor with a count.

The scanner is a keyboard. The search box holds the focus permanently, so a scan lands in the cart no matter what the cashier last touched — nobody has to tap the box first. This is the single most common thing to get wrong on a till, and it is worth testing on purpose.

Typing searches the register's own copy of the catalogue, so it answers instantly and works with the line down. If the product has sizes and colours, Choose size and colour opens a grid.

The stock figure is labelled In stock as of last sync, which is honest rather than reassuring. A zero does not block the sale by default — the goods may be on the counter in front of you, and the server is the authority on stock anyway.

Cash in your base currency, with the rounding your store configured. The default is to the nearest 0.10, applied to the cash portion only, and the rounding difference is written down on the payment rather than quietly swallowed.

Cash in a foreign currency you accept. The payment records the currency, the amount handed over, the rate used and the equivalent in your base currency — all four, because a year later twenty dollars on its own is not an answer.

Card (terminal) is recorded by hand: the cashier runs the standalone terminal exactly as they always have and types the Approval reference back in. There is no integrated terminal in this version. One sale can be split across several of these.

The register builds the receipt correctly, in both languages, for 58 mm and 80 mm paper, and it knows exactly which bytes to send. What it does not have is a channel to send them down — there is no printer connection in the app at all.

So completing a sale renders the paper and then tells you No printer is configured — the receipt was not printed. The cash drawer does not open either, because it opens on a pulse from the printer.

This is the hardware lab's work and it has not run. Do not plan an opening day around handing customers printed receipts from this system.

A customer goes back for another size and there is a queue behind them. Park puts the cart aside under a name you choose, and Parked sales brings it back.

Park nothing you can avoid parking. A parked cart reserves no stock at all, so two parked carts can both be holding the last unit.

Returns are in the same menu. A cashier can take one and it asks for a supervisor PIN. The lookup box takes the focus, so scanning the customer's receipt works without anybody tapping first.

Each line shows how many of it can still come back. Something already returned in full says so and cannot be returned twice. Per line you say why it is coming back and whether the goods are Resellable — back on the shelf — or Damaged, which takes them out of sellable stock instead.

The refund is worked out for you. It is a slice of the discount that was frozen onto that line when the sale was rung, not a fresh calculation — which is what makes returning one item of a buy-two-get-one deal come out right instead of handing back money the customer never paid.

This is off when you start, and switching it on is a decision. The switch is No-receipt refund limit, per cashier per day in Preferences, and it ships at zero. Zero means off, and the No receipt button does not appear on the register at all — a button that always refuses teaches a cashier to stop reading refusals.

Set the limit above zero and the button appears. The refund is store credit and nothing else, and the goods come back at today's price. With no receipt there is nothing to check the price against, which is exactly why the money has to stay in the shop.

Store credit needs somebody to hold it, so the register lets a cashier enrol a customer on the spot, offline, rather than sending them to the back office with a customer standing in front of them.

The register is built to keep selling. An amber band appears across the top and everything below it carries on. Searching and scanning work, because the catalogue is on the device. Cash works, including foreign currency. Recording a card taken on the bank's own terminal works. Parking and resuming work. A return against a receipt this register rang works.

What needs the line: pairing a device for the first time, a brand-new person's first sign-in, finding a receipt from another branch or another register, and opening a shift on a catalogue that has gone too old.

Everything sold offline sits in a queue on the device. Sync queue in the menu shows every item as Waiting, In flight, Synced or Needs attention, with the server's own words on anything refused and a Retry on each one.

Closing is a cash count and a reconciliation. It is the moment the day becomes a number you can trust, so it is worth doing properly even in a test run.

You count first and the expected figures appear afterwards. That is not a design preference: a cashier who can see what the drawer should hold can count to it, and the difference — the only signal that anything is wrong — becomes impossible to obtain.

The register's menu also has Pay in, Pay out and Open drawer (no sale). Use them for a change float going in, money going out for supplies, or opening the drawer with no sale — that last one asks for a supervisor and records a reason. All of them feed the Z-report; cash taken out any other way is cash the count cannot explain.