Point of Sale

A rule about receipts can be an integration, an architecture or an accreditation, and only the first is something you can shortlist for. The third is answered by a public register in about two minutes and almost nobody evaluating from outside the country knows to look. Our own audit against one European regime, including the six days this site contradicted itself.

Four East African authorities run four separate schemes against four separate interfaces, and one question separates them: can the sale complete when the authority cannot be reached? We built for one answer, for one country. The consequence we had never written down is that the receipt your customer carries out of the shop does not yet carry the fiscal reference — and a POS filing that failed three times had nowhere to go, which we fixed the day we published this.

Victoria makes a second-hand dealer keep goods exactly as they arrived for seven days, record where each item is stored, and — for scrap metal — never pay in cash. Our till is built for the other direction entirely.

Japan's misleading-representation penalty is three per cent of the sales you made of those goods during the period the claim was displayed. We can produce the sales for any window; nothing here records when a price or a claim was in force.

Hold a cheque too long and the drawer can be discharged to the extent of the damage your delay caused. A cheque carries three dates and a payment row here has one column — and the till cannot take one at all.

Canada's legal-tender limits are written in denominations, and a till records a payment as one number. The gap is not a compliance problem — it is a modelling one, and two of the missing pieces are worth having anyway.

British price marking treats a price as five properties: a number to a stated precision, a unit, a condition, a currency and a relative type size. A price field is one of them — and two of the five belong to how something is printed.

Nigeria clears a business-to-business invoice before it reaches the buyer and reports a till receipt after it is issued. Those are two machines, not two settings — and only one of them can stand in front of a queue on a Saturday afternoon.

A comment on the till code promised that failed fiscal filings were reconciled with a manual button. The comment had been copied from the invoice flow, which had one. The till did not, and the job gave up after three attempts.

The till and the stock valuation once used different definitions of what an item cost. Both were defensible, both were implemented correctly, and the integrity report comparing them reported a variance that was purely a difference of opinion.

A refund reversed the sale, returned the stock and balanced the drawer perfectly. It also left cash overstated on the balance sheet by the amount refunded, and a matching phantom balance in receivables — for the life of the tenant, in silence.

An offline till is not one feature. It is four, they fail independently, and most systems claiming offline mode have built one or two. Here is the honest map of which are here — none — and what that means before you buy anything.