Okay, everyone knows a software bug when they see it, right? In Retail Point of Sale (POS), if three items priced at $10.00 each add up to a subtotal of $5,982.82, there’s a bug. Or if all the items have been deleted from a transaction but you’re looking at a negative tax amount in the subtotal, there’s a bug. Bugs are bugs.  In software development, some software bugs are inevitable.

But what about something less obvious? Let’s say that the Sale window shows an unexpected discount on an item; is it a software bug? Or could it be a discount automatically applied to the customer? Or let’s say that you go to do a Drawer Reconcile and find that the window appears to be half missing? Is that a software bug—or could it be you have just run into a security feature for counting the drawer called a Blind Reconcile? What about when you can’t click the Transaction Lookup button in the POS Sale window because the lookup is grayed out (darn thing)? Is that a software bug? Or are you just seeing the results of a user option that gives companies more control of how cashiers interact with the system?  The answers to all of the above are the same:  “No, it’s not a bug,” and “Yes, it’s a feature.” In fact, you have control to fine-tune most of them.

Some [apparent] snafus could be safety nets; others point back to set-up options that are more flexible than you realized. In one of our previous examples, the transaction lookup button was grayed out in the POS Sale window. Did you know that “Overriding Trx Number” is actually one of the Retail Point of Sale User Options, which can be set to Available to All Users but can also be disabled entirely or made available on a password basis?  For additional layers of control over which POS users experience which behavior, Retail Point of Sale has its own user definitions where certain POS users can be set up as Managers. Manager-users then can have different features available only to them, or the features can require a POS Manager password. It’s up to you.

From main menu options such as lock, no sale, suspend and resume, to pricing options such as allowing markdowns, discounts, price overrides and negative quantities, POS User Options offer a multitude of choices for fine-tuning the system.  With the knowledge of how User Options work and what the various choices are, you have what you need to set up the POS system to exactly meet your needs.  Knowing your POS User Options as well as Tender Options will reveal flexibility you might never even have realized you had.

The next time you assume “BUG,” it might be time to look for the feature you could be leveraging.

To learn more about Retail Point of Sale’s features, contact us or schedule a demo.