POS software guide

POS software guide

To have a better understanding of POS software, one must first get familiar with the concept of POS. POS stands for point-of-sale or point-of-service, which can mean anything from a retail shop, checkout counter, basically any location at which a transaction occurs. Considering all that, it's not hard to see why pos terminals can be found in restaurants, hotels, bars, shops, stores, malls. To be completely accurate, we can say that POS refers to the hardware and software which cashiers use for checkouts.When we consider a POS system, it has to be divided into hardware and software.

Since this article is focused on the software part of it, let's examine the history of pos software. Some of the early electronic cash registers had a special computer program loaded on them, providing additional functionalities, although quite limited according to our standards nowadays. Programmability made way for a lot of new concepts, as it allowed developers to be more creative and embed whatever features they can think of, includingreal time labor and food cost reports.A protocol is a predefined set of rules which computers follow when engaged in communication with one another.

POS terminals communicate with other devices (peripherals) using a given protocol, so we can say that the protocol is the language that computers speak. Every pos software comes with a support of a certain protocol, so that it can succesfully interact with peripheral devices, such as POS printer, a bar-code scanner, and a credit/debit card reader. Some of the popular POS communication command protocols are EPSON Esc/POS, ADM 787/788, DSP-800, CD 5220.In an attempt to guarantee the compatibility between the different devices, pos software developers have to meet certain standards. Microsoft, NCR, Epson, and Fujitsu-ICL developed the first pos software standard, called OPOS. People know it as "OLE for POS", because it's based on Microsoft's COM technology, which makes OPOS language independent. The next industry standards was made by SUN, IBM and NCR, under the name JavaPOS. JavaPOS is programmed on JAVA, so it's platform independent.