Tills and the POS catalogue

The agent

It runs on the till’s computer, on Windows, and does one of two things depending on how the venue is set up:

• sits between the point of sale and its printer and sends a copy of every ticket;
• reads the POS database and mirrors it onto the server.

It sends with that till’s key. When the server does not answer it keeps the capture and retries: it deletes its only copy once the server confirms the row is committed.

The catalogue

The catalogue is what the installation knows about each point of sale, and it is shared by every venue on that POS.

Receipt types. What that till prints, and which of those papers is the sale. On SoftRestaurant the Cuenta is the sale; the Comanda is the kitchen copy and is ignored; the Corte Z is the day’s close, used to reconcile rather than to add up.

Vocabulary. One line per field: what that POS calls, on its papers, the thing we call the folio, the table, the waiter, the total. This is what you write to teach it a till it has never seen.

Stored columns. The other half: which table of the POS database holds the bills and which column is the total. Only read for venues captured from their database.

Adding a point of sale that is not here

You write it in the catalogue, not in the code. That is enough for it to be read.

What we cannot promise is that it works first time: the four SoftRestaurant versions here were tested against real installations, and for anything else we have no till to test on.