Programming cash registers

This topic comes up often whenever people are shopping for cash registers and are trying to get the cheapest one they can. OK none of us wants to spend more money than needed right? Well before doing that figure out what is needed!

Perfect example of how this affects a business happened this morning at my office. A customer had called a couple weeks a go looking for five registers. The customer was very sure of the make and model they wanted and just wanted a price. Nothing more just price, price, and price! The customer was really sure this was the best machine for them and there was not going to be an opportunity to discuss anything else.

They bought the 5 registers and took delivery of them. This week the customer called for support to get started programming the registers, no problem we do that all the time. In discussing programming and set up with the end-user I quickly determined it was going to take 3 to 4 hours to program each machine. It take a very long time to enter the names of hundreds of items, prices for hundreds of items, make the custom keyboard etc etc. That is a lot of time 3 to 4 hours times 5 registers so now looking at 15 to 20 hours of your time programming cash registers.

If the time had been taken to discuss the other options we would have steered them to a register that has an SD card port so after programming one register the data could be transferred to another register within a matter of minutes! So now it would still be 4 to 4 hours programming the first register and maybe 30 minutes each for the other 4 including taking them out of the box as you can quickly replicate them rather than re-doing all the work!

So when buying more than one register where the program will be the same make sure you buy one with and SD card port, or an IRC feature, or PC software all of these features would allow you to clone the first programmed register. Also if you decided to use a Datacap Twin Tran to accomplish credit card interface with your cash registers IRC would allow you to share one interface rather than needing one per register.

Very few Sharp cash registers come with a SD card port or PC interface. Many more SAM4s cash registers have free utility software for programming and SD card ports in almost all newer models.

So if you save $50.00 a register is it worth 20 hours of your time? I doubt it is. Consult with us before you pull the trigger on buying your cash register to make certain you are at least presented with your choices and make an informed decision. 1-800-863-2274