POS for farmers' market vendors

A till that fits in your apron

SeroPOS runs on Android and iPhone with a layout made for small screens: Home, Categories and Cart tabs, a speed dial for the cash drawer and held sales, and a compact payment screen. Set up your products on the back office or in the app's Admin, with photos if you want them or plain name-and-price cards if you prefer speed.

Products you sell every week, such as a dozen eggs, a jar of honey or a bunch of kale, sit in categories one tap away. Items that change price, such as the last box of tomatoes at closing, can be rung up as open-price items. Turn on Retail Mode for shop wording and a single New Sale button, with restaurant screens hidden.

When the signal drops

Market sites are rarely known for good coverage. SeroPOS saves every sale on the device with a unique token first, then uploads it to the back office. If the upload fails, it retries every 20 seconds and backs off for up to 30 minutes, and a sale that keeps failing is parked on the device, never dropped. An indicator on the app bar shows whether you are online.

Some things do need a connection: looking up a scanned barcode on a phone, the DSR, Recent Transactions, and of course authorising card payments on most terminals. Plan for cash during a full outage. When the signal comes back, sales upload without anyone pressing a button, and Sync DataBase forces a sync if you want to be sure.

• Sales saved on the device first
• Automatic retries when the signal returns
• Unsent sales parked, never lost
• Online indicator on the app bar

Weighing at the stall

Tick Enable Weight on loose produce, cheese or nuts and price it per kilogram or pound. On an Android phone or tablet, connect a USB scale through an OTG adapter and the till reads the weight when the item is added. On iPhone or iPad, and whenever the scale isn't connected, a keypad asks for the weight. Decimal quantities show on the receipt.

If you pre-pack bags at home with a fixed weight, set them up as ordinary products at a fixed price instead, which is faster in a queue. Variations cover sizes such as a half pint, pint and quart of berries, each with its own price and stock. A product can be both weighed and fixed-price only if you set it up as two products, so decide which way each item sells.

Cards, cash and the end of the day

For cards, SeroPOS can run directly on a Global Payments T650P handheld with Terminal Plus, so the till and the card reader are one device. It also works with Moneris Go and Global Pay Cloud terminals, which take the amount from the app over the internet. For cash, enter the amount received and the screen shows the change.

At the end of the market, open the DSR for today's sales, payments by method, item sales and payouts, and print it if you have a printer. The back office has the same day's sales with the location's other days, so you can compare this Saturday with last month's. Close the register with the counted cash to finish the day.