Pastel makes point of sale operations easier for SMEs

In line with its strategy of letting business drive technology and going beyond accounting, Softline Pastel has brought to market a point of sale (POS) add-on module for its Pastel Partner accounting software range.

Says Softline Pastel managing director, Steven Cohen: "Of the 160 000 local businesses and in the 51 other countries around the world that use Pastel software, the majority have some sort of POS data capturing and invoicing requirement. Not all are pure retail organisations but nearly all have some section of their business that sells either to the trade or people off the street."

In a business world working at ever-increasing speed, businesses, especially SMEs, all share a need to improve loss prevention and management of store inventory, alleviate data capturing errors, speed goods receipt, and boost the accuracy of back office systems.

This has led to a requirement for robust, high volume processing capability at the point of sale, says Cohen. He adds that many of Pastel's customers have simply adjusted their existing Pastel invoicing functionality to try and cope, but invoicing software is much more complex and detail-oriented and therefore not suited to the POS environment.

As a general rule, POS environments are often manned by people with fairly low levels of IT literacy or by casuals, like students, who have no direct insight into the running of the business. One needs, therefore, to make their operations as simple as possible - to eliminate errors and to prevent customers wasting time in queues.

"We therefore decided to extend Pastel's traditional invoicing functionality into a true POS environment," Cohen says.

Key features of Pastel POS include the ability to process all daily reporting such as daily sales and variance reports, processing of cash-ups at multiple times during the day (making shift changes simpler and faster), and scanning of inventory items and serial numbers into the system.

The solution also allows for both cash and account sales - as well as quotations and orders. Bar-coding and scanning features cater for shops that have different prices for packs with different weights. Running on a standard, networked PC, Pastel POS continues to work when the main business servers are down, updating itself to Pastel Partner automatically when the servers come back online.

The application integrates with all POS devices, including till slip printers and credit card machines.

For existing Pastel Partner and Pastel Xpress customers, the POS add-on module is available as a seamless upgrade. It can be bought by new customers as a standalone option.