How to choose a POS system for a small shop

A point of sale (POS) system is the thing you ring sales up on. For a small shop it usually also keeps stock counts and shows reports. There are many to choose from, and they all look good in a demo. The demo is not your shop.

Before you compare anything, take ten minutes and write down what is going wrong now. Maybe you never know what is left on the shelf. Maybe your cashier cannot be trusted with the cost prices. Maybe you spend Sunday night adding up paper slips. Pick your top three. Every system you look at must solve those three well. The rest is a bonus.

It is also fine to name categories when you search. You will find three broad kinds: simple apps that run on a phone or tablet, fuller systems built around a counter with dedicated hardware, and large retail suites aimed at chains. A shop with one or two tills and a few hundred products almost always belongs in the first or second group. If you want to see how particular products stack up, the comparison pages lay out the facts side by side.

Work down these nine points. For each one, ask the question in the table and write down the answer. Do not rely on memory or the sales page.

The old picture of a POS is a till, a receipt printer, a drawer and a scanner, all bought together. Many small shops now run on a phone or tablet instead, with a drawer and a Bluetooth scanner added only if they need them.

The phone route is cheaper to start and easy to replace: if the tablet breaks, borrow a phone. The counter-terminal route can be faster for very high volume and is often more robust. Decide by your queue. If you serve a customer a minute at peak, the phone route is fine. If you serve five at once, look harder at a dedicated setup.

• Count the hardware you would have to buy: device, stand, scanner, printer, cash drawer.
• Ask whether receipts must be printed. Many customers are happy with a receipt on screen or a link they can share.
• Check that a cheap Bluetooth or USB barcode scanner will work, rather than only the maker's own model.

Almost every vendor says their system works offline. Ask exactly what that means. Can you still ring a sale? Can you still search products? Do sales sync when the connection returns, and what happens if two devices sold the last item at the same time?

Test it yourself during the trial. Turn on airplane mode, ring up five sales, turn it off again and check the totals. A system that fails this test will fail you in the middle of a power cut.

Many systems are designed for one large market and bolt on others. Check three things.

• Currency. Can you set it once and have every price, receipt and report use it, with the right symbol and formatting?
• Sales tax. Can you set the rate yourself, and flag individual products as taxable or not? Rules differ between places and change over time, so confirm yours with your tax authority or an accountant.
• Payment types. You will take cash, cards, bank transfers and perhaps local wallets. Ask whether the system records these or processes them. Recording is enough if you already have a card machine. Processing means the vendor takes a fee on every payment.

Be careful of any product that ties you to its own payment service. That is where many small shops find the real cost.

Some systems only subtract a sale from a count. Others track every movement: received, returned, damaged, expired, lost, counted. For a shop with fifty products, the first is enough. For a shop with five hundred, you want the second, because that is the only way to find out why the numbers drift.

Look for these in a trial: adding products fast (name, price, quantity is enough to start), importing a spreadsheet, a quick stock count, and a reminder when something runs low. If you want to see what good looks like, read about how to track inventory in a small shop.

Staff access

Your cashier needs to sell, search and take payment. They do not need to see what you paid for stock or how much you made. Check that the system has at least two roles, and that the restricted one really hides costs, profit and settings.

Data export

Ask: if I leave, can I download my products, stock levels and sales history as a CSV or Excel file? If the answer is vague, treat it as no.

Support

Find out the support hours in your time zone, and whether you reach a person or a help article. Send a question during the trial and see how long the reply takes.

A small mini-mart with 400 products, two staff and a patchy connection scores each point from 0 to 3, then weights the points that matter most. Option A is a free app. Option B is a paid system with a monthly fee.

Option A scores 3 x 1 + 3 x 2 + 2 x 0 + 2 x 2 + 2 x 3 + 2 x 3 = 25. Option B scores 3 x 3 + 3 x 3 + 2 x 3 + 2 x 3 + 2 x 3 + 2 x 1 = 38 out of a possible 45. The monthly fee of, say, $30 is $360 a year. If the extra control saves one wrong stock order or one till shortage a month, it pays for itself. Your numbers will differ. The point is to make the trade-off visible instead of deciding on price alone.

1. Write your top three problems.
2. Shortlist two or three systems that suit a shop your size.
3. Run each through the nine-point checklist and note the answers.
4. Set up 20 real products and ring through a real basket on each.
5. Test with the connection off.
6. Ask a cashier to try it with no training. Watch where they hesitate.
7. Export your data once, to prove you can.
8. Pick the one that solves your top three and does not surprise you on cost.

Moving later is possible but disruptive, so spend the week now. If you are coming from a notebook, moving from a notebook to software covers how to get your products across.

Shopkeepa is built for the small shop that wants a simple POS and honest stock numbers in one place. It runs on a phone, tablet or computer, is built with unreliable connections in mind, lets you set your currency and sales tax, and keeps cashiers away from cost and profit. It records payments rather than processing them. It is in development, and you can join the early access list to help shape it. See the point of sale page for what it does.