Point of Sale Fundamentals

Point of Sale is the selling front end of AWRA — the screen a cashier uses to ring up a customer quickly. What makes it powerful is that it is not a standalone till: every sale it records is a real stock issue against inventory and, where relevant, a record against a customer.

That connection is the whole point. The moment an item is sold at the counter, on-hand stock drops, the sale is captured for reporting, and finance gains the context behind the takings. There is no separate "update the system later" step — the act of selling is the act of recording.

In practice, a typical setup for a multi-branch retailer gives each shop its own till, tied to that branch’s warehouse, so a sale in one shop draws down only that shop’s stock. A cashier opens a drawer with a counted opening float at the start of the shift and sells through the day, while head office sees each branch’s takings and stock as they happen rather than in an end-of-day message.

A sale is built by adding items to the cart, confirming quantities, taking payment, and issuing a receipt. Payment can be cash, card, or another configured method, and the receipt is the customer’s proof of purchase.

As the cart is completed, stock for each item is decremented immediately. This is why accuracy at the till matters: scanning or selecting the right item keeps both the customer’s receipt and the inventory record correct.

In practice: a customer buys three items and pays part in cash and the rest by mobile money. The cashier adds the items by scanning or searching, records each tender with its amount, and types the mobile-money confirmation code into the payment reference so the takings can be matched later. A barcode the till does not recognise is logged rather than ignored, so a manager can see which products are missing from the catalogue and link them.

POS reads item prices from the catalogue, so a price set once is applied consistently. The till asks the same price lists as quotes and invoices: the customer’s own list first, then your default list, then the item’s selling price. Discounts can be applied at the line or sale level, and because they are recorded, leadership can later see how much was given away and why.

Linking a sale to a customer turns an anonymous transaction into history: it supports loyalty, credit, and follow-up, and it lets reporting show who buys what over time. It also prices the sale from that customer’s price list, where they have one.

In practice: a regular trade customer has a price list 5% below retail. The cashier links the customer to the sale, every line is priced from that list automatically, and any further discount given at the counter is recorded against the sale, so reports show both. Each sold line also stores the item’s cost at the moment of sale, which keeps the margin on that sale accurate even after the item’s cost changes.

At the end of a shift or day, the till is closed: the system’s expected takings are compared against the cash and other tender actually counted. Differences are surfaced as a variance to investigate rather than quietly absorbed.

A clean day-close is what lets finance trust the numbers. Because every sale was recorded as it happened, reconciliation is a check, not a reconstruction.

In practice, expected cash is the opening float plus cash sales, minus any cash drops taken to the safe during the shift. The cashier counts the drawer and enters the figure; AWRA records the difference as the variance and marks the drawer as waiting for review. A supervisor — never the cashier who closed it — then signs it off, and only then is any shortage or overage posted to the Cash Over and Short account, so a miscount can be recounted before it reaches the books.