Simple Point Of Sale software solution

April 21, 2008 10:01 PM

Help me find an easy Point of Sale software solution for our business

I've just gone through two months of absolute frustration dealing with a custom FilemakerPro programmer that my company hired. Unfortunately, he is not good at what he does, accepts no fault for the constant errors and mistakes in his program, and we are ready to dump him and count the 2/3rds payment as a loss and move on to another solution.

Our needs are fairly basic:

1. Seven registers selling various items within one location. Three registers sell Concessions, three sell Souvenirs, and one sells a single separate Concession item.

2. Centralized data for the registers. We need basic reports by station, items sold, etc.

3. A very, very easy touch interface. Virtually none of our items are barcode scannable, so a series of buttons with items on screen is ideal.

4. IP based credit card support.

I've been looking at several other solutions lately (this wasn't my project when the decision to go custom was made), and Quickbooks POS doesn't look good for a touch screen setup; Microsoft Dynamics POS looks promising, but haven't had a chance to give it a test drive.

I'm fairly certain there are good Filemaker programmers out there who have quite possibly made a POS solution; we already purchased 7 copies of Filemaker Pro and the Filemaker Server to run the data.

We have the Dell POS hardware in place already, so looking for any experience you have with PC based POS software.

posted by shinynewnick to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You probably shouldn't have purchased 7 copies of Filemaker Pro to support the data... I'm sure that plenty of POS solutions do not use Filemaker pro as any sort of a backend... and may not even be able to export into a format Filemaker pro supports (if you're using it for some other reason)...

Are you using Filemaker for some other reason besides "supporting" your POS system? If not, I'd see if you can return it...

I can't help much on the POS front, but at least wanted to point out you might not need (or even be able to use) those copies of Filemaker...
posted by twiggy at 12:23 AM on April 22

Ah, I should have been clearer about the Filemaker part. The programmer uses Filemaker as his base for his program; the POS interface is built entirely in Filemaker, with the data centrally held on Filemaker Server.

For all I care, Filemaker can be dumped in the trash immediately after finding another solution, it's just another sunk cost at this point.
posted by shinynewnick at 4:20 AM on April 22

Any restaurant-centric POS system should accomplish what you want- especially the touch-screen part. (No barcodes on plates of food!)

We use a system called POSiTouch, but it is pretty expensive. However, there are many "out of the box" POS systems that should be able to do what you want. Aldelo Systems makes one - I have no experience with it other than knowing it is a fairly low cost option.

I feel your pain about bad programmers...
posted by Futurehouse at 8:32 AM on April 22

I don't have a specific program to suggest, but I do have enough experience with Dynamics to know that although it's improved greatly over the years, it's still a huge, clunky, pain in the ass.

You might try rentacoder.com or odesk.com to find someone who'll finish what your programmer started. Filemaker should be perfectly adequate as a platform for your purposes, if you don't want to lose that part of your investment. A suggestion: back up everything before firing the guy, then lock his account and change passwords on any other accounts he had access to immediately afterward, just in case.
posted by notashroom at 1:52 PM on April 22

notashroom, what are the specific downsides to Dynamics? It looks to be the closest to the client's desired interface, and at a fairly reasonable price point. Without a demo to download, I'm a bit stuck at this point.

For a short period, I considered getting full access to his program and just finishing it myself. But the errors in his database design and sales reports are just too deep for me to mess with, considering I've never touched Filemaker code and my database knowledge is limited to a handful of CS classes. We sell the same items in two of the locations, and he couldn't get the items to show up in both locations (after claiming to have spent two months working on the program for us). So his wonderful database solution was to make us duplicate the offending items manually for each location. This of course made almost all sales reports inaccurate (number of items sold were doubled, location sold was not right), and after a full month they're still not correct. We're having problems on so many levels, no one trusts any part of the program.
posted by shinynewnick at 8:09 PM on April 22

Dynamics tends to require more steps to achieve a goal, confuse users with its interfaces, require more training, and generate more end-user complaints than other software in my experience. YMMV, and it might be great for you.

It sounds as if the errors with his code probably are based on improper relationship handling in the datasets for the reports, which can be tricky if you're not familiar with database normalization and relationship-building, but might well be a pretty quick fix for a FileMaker pro. I'm a SQL/Access pro, so I couldn't help with any specifics, but those are pretty common design errors to need fixing and not necessarily something that invalidates the rest of the design work he's put in for you. You may be closer than you think.
posted by notashroom at 9:19 AM on April 23

Thanks very much for the update, the interface is the largest concern at this point.

I'm also certain that the report errors could be fixed without too much difficulty, but the best way to describe the custom program is that it only works in a best-case scenario. Any user error in input, method, routine, etc. is not handled well at all. And the higher-ups are frustrated with the program and the programmer to the point of writing off the entire business with him as a loss.
posted by shinynewnick at 5:49 PM on April 23

Without someone qualified to look over his code and tell you how much of it is crap and whether it's worth salvaging, you're probably right that the best thing to do perception-wise is dump it and move on. Otherwise you could be in for years of "This is all because of that crap programmer who ..."

An idea: call Microsoft or one of their channel partners (such as CDW) and request a demo CD for Dynamics POS. Just because there's not a freely downloadable demo doesn't mean there's not a demo. You can likely get demo CDs/downloads or on-site demos for most of the other options you'd consider as well. Good luck to you.
posted by notashroom at 11:04 AM on April 24