r/POS

I'm part of the small team that builds be-BOP, so take this as "here's what our users are actually doing with it" rather than a neutral review.

Some history

The whole thing started almost by accident. A small French-Swiss publishing house (PVH éditions) with a strong love for Free Software, Open Source and let's be honest Copyleft needed to sell books at fairs and online without the usual mess: plugin ecosystems that break on every update (hi WordPress/PrestaShop), crowdfunding platforms that take a significant cut with little discovery to counter it and that can freeze your campaign mid-way, no good or native Bitcoin support anywhere (they are really into Free Software). So they built their own checkout. Then it needed inventory. Then a POS mode for the fair booth. Then ticketing, subscriptions, donations, peerfunding. At some point the POS got bigger as we got money to improve it and bring more features tailored for bars and restaurants. It changed so much that we quickly stopped calling it "La bookinerie" (the bookshop tool) and it turned into a bigger open source project, AGPL-3.0, code's public on GitHub. You can self-host it or run it on our Cloud for a flat monthly fee (in a few jurisdiction for now), we don't take a cut of your sales either way. Whatever payment processor you pick still charges its own fees though, that part's out of our hands. Also as it's a WebApp, there is no hardware required beside: screen, web browser, internet connection.

Real world stories

Le Coffice, a café in Neuchâtel on the ground floor of a coworking space, has self-hosted for over a year now and paid us for a bit of custom dev along the way. Owner's happy, their accountant's very happy, which might honestly be the best review we've gotten. The bar owner is also fairly happy with the solution but let's be honest we still have to improve a few things to be really competitive feature-wise and UX-wise to the giants such as lightspeed. But they are making good feedback to us and we have improvements planned, for now ressources are more towards the legal aspect for France and UE for our SaaS and the online e-commerces feature set.

Their payment setup is a decent showcase of the "no single built-in gateway" approach: cards through SumUp (we also currently support stripe, PayPal and PayZen by OSB), Bitcoin Lightning Network through Swiss Bitcoin Pay (we also support other solution for LN and BTC), they also even set up GNU Taler. For cash (still fairly popular in Switzerland) and Twint (a popular swiss mobile payment app, kind of like our local Venmo) they use be-BOP's own "PoS Payment Subtypes" feature, which lets you define more or less unlimited manual payment methods (asynchronous confirmation) that each show up distinctly in the accounting instead of piling into one "other" bucket, cash being a default option. Coworker members get 20% off soft drinks through the discount feature.

Their is also board game bar and restaurant that made extensive tests and reviews of our early versions. They uses something I didn't expect to matter this much: instead of tracking only tables, they also needed track cups. That's because people can mix between tables and just change groups frequently over their stays. A group's order pools onto one running tab, and at the end the waiter can splits it however the table actually wants, by share, by item, or just closes it as one ticket. Waiters can also if needed transfer products from a pool to another (before any payments being initialised).

Actual limitations

Where we're honestly still behind: the French self-certification requirements for POS anti-fraud rules aren't done yet, so it's not available for VAT businesses in that country. And on the POS side for our Cloud customers we don't want to promote it by default to avoid our support ressources being monopolised, we focus on e-commerce for the moment and we are looking into partnership to have POS support and cloud service more official let's say. We'll make exceptions case by case but we're not pretending that our Cloud Services are for PoS users yet.

Looking to learn more about be-BOP?

What we want out of this post: more businesses willing to run it (self-hosting), contributors submitting PR or correcting translation, software engineer breaking it, and business telling us what's missing for them to adopt it.

It's AGPL, the code's right there to read or fork: https://github.com/be-BOP-io-SA/be-BOP. There's also a 2-hour sandbox if you want to poke at it without signing up for anything: https://sandbox.be-bop.dev/product/be-bop-sandbox-2h

Happy to get into the stack, the payment-methods architecture, or why we went AGPL instead of something more permissive. If you have any other questions feel free to ask!

be-BOP's POS feature list
There is more of course but here is a digest glimpse of our solution

Selling & the touch screen

• Tap-to-add product grid with photos and live prices
• Favorites shortcut and custom categories, built from your own product tags
• Per-item notes ("no onions", "gift wrap") that carry through to the kitchen ticket and receipt
• Same interface on a full-size terminal or a small tablet, responsive design for mobile UX too

Restaurant & bar service

• Unlimited open tabs, tables, bar tabs, takeaway. Running at once, grouped and named by area
• Move or merge items between tables: split a group, combine tables, shift a round
• Kitchen tickets auto-routed by station (kitchen vs. bar, based on your Tags)
• Reprint-safe: send only newly added items, so nothing already fired gets remade
• Tables clear themselves once fully paid

Payments & splitting the bill

• Cash (with a change-due calculator), integrated card terminals (Stripe/SumUp), PayPal, GNU Taler, Bitcoin/Lightning every method is optional
• Add your own payment types for anything else accepted locally
• Split a bill evenly (2–9 ways, or custom) or by specific item
• Each split portion can be paid a different way, with a live running balance
• One consolidated receipt once the whole bill is settled

Cash drawer & shift management

• Opening float suggested from the previous shift's closing balance
• Guided close-out: count the till, see any discrepancy instantly, log a reason if there's a gap
• Closing is blocked while any table still has an unpaid balance
• Read-only sales snapshot mid-shift (X-ticket) any time, full end-of-day report (Z-ticket) on close
• Every past shift logged and searchable: amounts, staff, duration

Tax, discounts & receipts

• VAT calculated and itemized by rate automatically, with support for multiple regimes
• Reduced VAT rates settable per product
• Register-level discounts always paired with a logged reason
• Itemized receipts (or a full invoice) with VAT breakdown, emailable to the customer

Behind the scenes

• One catalog powers your online store and every register, no duplicate entry
• Per-product control over what sells online vs. in-store vs. elsewhere
• Real-time stock shared across every channel
• Cashier accounts scoped to just the register; granular permissions for every other role
• Built-in sales/payment reporting with CSV export, 150+ currencies, 7 interface languages

Curious how retailers with multiple locations handle promotions
say you're running a weekend discount across 10 or 20 stores. Updating the POS price seems like the easy part, but then you've got shelf prices, promo displays, stock levels and making sure everything switches back properly when the offer ends...
which part usually causes the biggest headache?
Do most retailers manage this centrally now, or is there still a lot of coordination happening store by store?

This cloud based system is real-time inventory and point-of-sale software for independent retailers, from a single shop to several locations.

Most shops lose money to phantom stock, the gap between what the system says is on the shelf and what is actually there.

**It shows up three ways.**

1. A best seller shows in stock, so nobody reorders, and a customer walks away.

2. Cash sits frozen in overstock you forgot you bought.

3. A count takes half a day and still does not match.

We fix the root cause, that a spreadsheet is a snapshot while inventory is a live number. The moment you ring up a sale, a return, or a transfer, the count updates in real time, and low-stock alerts fire before a top seller runs out. You see stock across every location in one place, or run a single store.

**What you get:**

* Real-time stock counts across every location
* Fast POS billing with barcode scanning and thermal receipts
* Low-stock and reorder alerts the instant stock drops
* Batch tracking and tax-compliant invoices
* Simple reports and a multi-branch dashboard
* Client-managed product categories, set up for your shop

It works alongside the card terminal you already use. The system records the sale, your terminal takes the payment, so nothing about payments changes. It runs on any device you already own, a phone, a tablet, or the computer at the counter.

Built for independent shops, convenience and specialty retail, and any small business that has outgrown the spreadsheet.

With the discontinuation of the penny how are POS systems going to handle it?

After tax is applied a rounding method needs to be in place, round up if over 3 cents and down if less or always round up?

How does the merchant account for the over/under amounts and reconcile reporting?

Does that over/under need to be reported to the gov?

Are any POS systems looking at this?

I’m working on a POS product for small businesses and I’m trying to understand what features actually matter most to people who use POS systems every day.
For those currently using a POS, what are the biggest problems or frustrations you have with your current system?
I’m particularly interested in inventory management, barcode scanning, bulk inventory imports, payments, user permissions, and reporting.
What feature do you wish your current POS handled better?

Hey everyone,

Over the past two years, our small team here in Scarborough has been building ZoltPOS. We've been heads-down trying to solve a specific friction point we kept seeing local restaurant owners run into: being trapped by POS providers that force them into a single, expensive payment processor with zero flexibility.

To address that, we architected the software around a few technical use cases:

• Multi-Processor Interoperability: Allowing merchants to choose or switch between major payment processors (like Clover, Global Pay, and Nuvei) without forcing them to throw out their hardware or pay heavy penalties.
• Resilience & Flow: Building for offline reliability (because internet drops during dinner rush are a nightmare) alongside things like direct Uber Eats order sync and local table-side app routing.

Since we're deep in the weeds on the engineering and product side, our biggest bottleneck right now is figuring out the distribution and growth side in the GTA market.

For those of you who have built or grown B2B SaaS/fintech products locally: how did you approach early-stage traction without a massive marketing budget?

Also, if anyone in the Ontario tech space is interested in collaborating on the business/growth side on a transparent revenue-share basis, I'd genuinely love to connect and talk shop.

anyone managing multiple retail locations, how do u keep shelf prices synced with what’s actually in the POS?
Manually changing labels seems manageable for one small store, but with thousands of products, promotions and multiple branches I imagine it gets messy pretty quickly
Are most stores using some kind of centralized system now, or is there still a lot of manual checking involved?
curious what people here have found works best.
thnks

I have been using Restaurant Manager for years. We bought it outright years ago. Restaurant Manager was bought by shift 4 a few years back and now they’re making it obsolete. I’m looking at shift4, SpotOn and Toast. What other POS do yall recommend?

I built a free cashier tool because Filipino store owners still ring up sales on pocket calculators

I kept running into the same thing in small shops here: the counter has a calculator, and the day's sales get written into a notebook at closing time — if at all. So the owner of 2–3 branches has one branch on a POS, one on Excel, one on paper, and no way to see the whole business.

My first attempt was a dashboard. Nobody would use it, because it asks you to do data entry today and pays you back a report tomorrow. That's homework.

So I built the counter instead: a cart with a running total, cash tendered, change due, per-item price memory. It pays back immediately, and the sales data becomes a byproduct — export a CSV that pastes straight into the dashboard.

Three static HTML pages. No backend, no accounts, no network calls at all — everything is in localStorage. Which also means no sync, and that's the honest gap I haven't solved.

https://eantaw.vercel.app/counter.html

What I actually want to know: is "give away the thing that saves them time now, get the data as a side effect" a sound wedge, or am I talking myself into it?

Hello everyone, please respect the post.

I'm currently a 4th-year IT student in the Philippines, and I recently built a custom system for a small dermatology clinic.

The client requested a web-based inventory and POS system with features including:

• Inventory management
• POS with barcode scanning
• Receipt generation
• Sales analytics
• Sales and inventory reports
• Role-based access (Admin and Cashier)
• Flexible report generation
• Localhost deployment
• Simple BAT/script launcher for easier access

The system is designed specifically around the clinic's workflow rather than being a generic POS solution.

For the hardware, the client will purchase the barcode scanner and receipt printer themselves. I am only providing and developing the software and will integrate the system with the hardware they purchase.

Since the users aren't very technical, I also created a simple launcher so they can basically just click an icon to open the system instead of manually starting XAMPP or navigating through the browser.

I'm now trying to figure out a fair price to charge for the project.

I don't want to overcharge because I know there are generic POS and inventory systems available that they could purchase. At the same time, this is a custom-built system designed specifically for their needs, and I've spent considerable time developing, testing, debugging, and refining it.

For those with experience in freelance development or software projects, how much would you personally charge for something like this in the Philippine market?

I'm especially interested in hearing how you would price it considering that I'm still a student and this is one of my first real client projects.

Thanks in advance!

What's the most expensive POS mistake you've seen at a restaurant?

Honestly, in my experience it's almost never the hardware that costs the most. It's the quieter stuff that goes unnoticed for weeks:

• Menu prices that are wrong (and nobody catches it until a customer points it out)
• Online orders coming in disconnected from the actual POS
• Inventory counts that just don't add up
• Payments failing silently in the background

What's the worst one you've run into?

Solo builder. I made a POS for tiny convenience shops after Square/Shopify felt like renting a jet for one register.

One decision I keep second-guessing:

A purchase order does not change on-hand. Only inbound does. Partial receiving is normal (ordered 20, truck brings 8). Cost updates as moving average on inbound, not “last price typed.”

Cashier is the usual stuff: scan, pay, refund puts qty back, shift cash the next person has to accept. Tax-inclusive prices. 58/80mm. Not a restaurant POS.

Do small-shop owners actually understand PO ≠ stock, or do they just want “I bought 20, so I have 20”?

If you were opening a restaurant today, would you still buy a traditional POS or would you choose a cloud system?

If possible please explain in 2 words - why?

Question for both the owners and technicians.

Please forgive me if this seems like an easy answer. I have never used Clover, I don’t even work at a restaurant. I work in the office for a man who owns several convenience store type locations and one full service restaurant with a new restaurant to be opening soon. I’ve only been here a few months, but we have this whole issue with the manager selling private parties out of the restaurant. Not the parties themselves but ringing them up so that everything distributes correctly. We use Clover Dining and we have tip pooling that goes through TipHaus.

So, basically she sells the buyout of the restaurant for $90per person with a minimum of let’s say 100 people. The party will make $9000. How are we supposed to ring that into clover to track the cost of the food & liquor and for the tips to be distributed to the correct servers? Especially if TipHaus is “by the day” pooling, so the tips are being allocated to people who worked before and after the private event?

Hi 👋

I run a Restaurant and Retail Tech Support company here in Canada and we're looking for a POS Solutions Advisor, fully remote. Not sure job posts are allowed here..

Job Type: Casual, Hourly On Call, Remote anywhere in Canada/USA.

The Role: We're looking for someone who genuinely knows the POS landscape — Clover, Square, Toast, Lightspeed, TouchBistro, and others — and can walk a restaurant and retail owner through the tradeoffs in plain language. You'll assess a business's size, menu complexity, service style (QSR, full-service, bar, etc.), and budget, then recommend and help implement the right system.

What you'll do: Consult with prospective restaurant clients to understand their operations and pain points Compare POS hardware/software options (pricing, contracts, integrations, hardware needs) Recommend the best-fit solution and support onboarding/setup Stay current on new POS releases, pricing changes, and integration capabilities (Zuppler, delivery platforms, accounting software, etc.) Represent us professionally in client meetings and demos What we're looking for Hands-on experience with at least 2-3 major POS platforms (working in a restaurant, POS sales, or IT/support role) Comfortable explaining technical tradeoffs to non-technical small business owners.

Compensation: - $25 Hourly on Call.

To apply: Send an email with your resume and a brief introduction to contactus@sevendesk.ca

We are an online business on tiktok, shopee and lazada.
Selling foods and clothing. For those who are knowledgeable in this, can you suggests providers?

Main focus
\- Staff time in and time out
\- Inventory/Expiration of products/ arrangement or per box and per sachaet sales
\- transaction history/summary

Hey everyone, quick question regarding the Square Handheld POS (the one that looks like a phone).

Does anyone know if its possible to install an Internet browser to the device, or to access the login page for public WiFi systems?

Taken it to my first big event and it won't connect to the event WiFi as it needs to load the terms and conditions page

Any help would be amazing