POS for events and festivals

One device per staff member

Festival crews work in a crowd, so the till has to move with them. The Global Payments T650P is a handheld card terminal, and with Terminal Plus SeroPOS runs on the terminal itself, using a compact layout made for its 360 by 640 screen. The cashier builds the order and the customer taps their card on the same device, with no pairing or cables.

SeroPOS also runs on Android phones and iPhones with a phone layout, and on tablets with the full layout. Moneris Go and Global Pay Cloud terminals take the amount from the app over the internet. A Bluetooth receipt printer can pair with phones and tablets for receipts and kitchen tickets, or receipts can be skipped altogether.

• SeroPOS on the T650P with Terminal Plus
• Phones, iPhone and tablets
• Moneris Go and Global Pay Cloud
• Bluetooth receipt and kitchen printers

When the network gives out

Every sale is written to the device first with a till-unique token, then uploaded to the back office. When the connection fails, the upload retries every 20 seconds and backs off for up to 30 minutes. A sale that keeps failing is parked on the device, never dropped, and goes up once the connection is back. The app bar shows whether the device is online.

Kitchen tickets still print offline, so a food stall keeps cooking. Some things need a connection: Recent Transactions, the daily sales report, barcode lookup on phones, and card authorisation on most terminals. When a card prompt stalls, Check on Terminal reads the terminal's batch to see whether the charge went through before anyone tries again.

A short menu for a long day

Events usually sell a fraction of the full range. Create a POS menu called Festival mapped to just the categories you will sell, and switch to it from the menu pills on the till. For food, the QSR grid on a tablet puts the event menu in fixed buttons with prices, and modifiers handle toppings and sauces.

Tips can be typed at payment, or added by the customer on a terminal that prompts for them. Custom tenders, such as Event Token or Voucher, can be added as payment methods so they are counted separately on the daily report. Hold parks an order while the customer finds their card.

Settling up at the end of the night

Each staff member opens a register with their float and closes it with the counted cash. The DSR shows bills, gross and net sales, discounts, tips, payouts and payments by method for the day, and prints as a Z report on the receipt printer. Card batches can be closed and printed from the terminal menu on Global Payments terminals.

Back at the office, the back office has every device's sales by user and location. If you run several stalls or several events, give each its own location, or use one location and compare staff in the Sales Representative Report. Monthly billing means you pay only for the months you trade.