Your first week, in the right order
A short checklist that avoids the two mistakes that cost the most: pricing before your units exist, and selling before your opening stock is in.
5 min read
Getting started
Set your business up before you sell anything
General settings, invoice templates and the handful of choices that are painful to change once you have been trading for a month.
6 min readUpdated
Settings, then General settings. The button at the bottom is Save settings. It is grouped into cards.
- Identity holds System title, Company name and VAT registration number.
- Money holds Store currency, Symbol position, Digits after the decimal point and Default profit margin.
- Dates and time holds Time zone, Date format, Expiry warning measured in and Warn me this far ahead.
- Selling rules is the one to read carefully. Allow sales and quotations for stock you do not have, Use packing slips to manage orders, and two switches for showing product details in the purchase and sale lists.
- Access and paperwork holds Staff access, Invoice format and GST state.
Use packing slips to manage orders is off by default. With it off, nobody can create a packing slip, and the Packing Slip and Challan screens stay empty and say so. Turn it on if you pick and dispatch orders.
Three catalogue settings underpin every price you will type. Do them before you add products.
- Settings, then Currencies. Add Currency asks for Currency Name, Currency Code, Symbol and Exchange Rate. Saving a rate of 1 makes that currency the default for the whole shop.
- Settings, then Taxes. Add Tax asks for Tax Name and Rate. Every product can then carry a rate, exclusive or inclusive.
- Settings, then Units. Add Unit asks for Code, Name, and optionally a Base Unit with an Operator and an Operation Value, which is how a carton of twelve takes twelve off the shelf.
Changing a unit's operator or value later restates every past sale and purchase counted in that unit, because the conversion is worked out fresh each time it is read. Get it right at the start.
A warehouse is where stock is held. Settings, then Warehouses, then Add Warehouse, which asks for Name, Phone Number, Email and Address. Your plan sets how many you may have, and the screen shows how many you have used.
A biller is the trading name and address printed on an invoice. Most businesses need one. People, then Biller list, then Add Biller, which asks for Name, Company Name, Email, Phone Number, Address and City.
Settings, then Invoice settings. Every sale prints one of these, and without one a sale has nothing to print. Add template asks for an Invoice type of A4, 58mm till roll or 80mm till roll, a Template name, a Prefix that goes in front of every number, a Numbering type, a Number of digits between 6 and 12, and a Start number.
- Use this one marks the template your receipts actually use. The badge reads In use.
- Make it the fallback marks the one used when nothing is In use.
- Company logo, Header text, Footer text and Primary colour affect the A4 template. The till roll templates print in black.
The receipt layout comes from this screen, not from POS settings. The Receipt type and Till roll width fields on POS settings are only used when no template is marked In use or fallback.
Settings, then POS settings. These are read the moment a till opens, so a change is live on every till the next time it loads.
- Defaults set the Default customer, Default warehouse and Default biller a new sale starts with.
- Ways to take money is the list of buttons on the payment screen. Turn at least one on. With none on, a cashier can ring up a sale and has no button to finish it, and the screen says so.
- Add another way to pay creates your own button, and the sale records the payment under that name.
- Cash register requires a register to be opened before selling and closed at the end of a shift.
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What the signup form asks for, what happens after you press the button, and how long it takes before you can sign in.
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