How to set up a POS system in one afternoon

Setting up a till has a reputation it mostly does not deserve. Ask around and you will hear about weeks of configuration, a consultant, and a training day. Some of that is true of large systems sold to large shops. Almost none of it is true of a small shop setting up a modern system for the first time.

What is true is that a POS setup is one slow job surrounded by several fast ones, and that shops routinely do them in the wrong order. They spend the whole afternoon perfecting the receipt logo and never get to the practice refund, which is the bit that matters at four o’clock on the first busy Saturday.

Here is the order that works. If you have your product list ready in any usable form, this is an afternoon.

Before you start: the one thing to have ready

Your product list, in a spreadsheet. This is the slow job, and it is the only part of a POS setup that takes real time, because it is the only part that is about your shop rather than about the software.

You need three columns at minimum: a name, a code, and a price. If you sell things with barcodes, the code is the barcode, and getting those in now saves you from typing them later. If you sell things without barcodes, invent codes that mean something to you.

If your list only exists as handwriting, as a supplier invoice, or in your head, that is the job. Do not start it at the same time as the software setup. Do it the evening before, or accept that the afternoon becomes two afternoons.

Do not try to be complete. Load your top fifty sellers. That is between eighty and ninety percent of your transactions in most small shops, which means you can open with them and add the long tail as it walks up to the counter. A catalogue that is fifty products and correct beats one that is four hundred products and half wrong.

Step 1: Create the account and open the till (10 minutes)

Sign up, create the store, log in, and get to the selling screen. On a system that runs in a browser there is nothing to install, so this really is minutes.

Do one thing before you go further: put the till on the actual device it will live on. The tablet on the counter, or the laptop, not the machine in the office you happen to be sitting at. Half the small snags in a POS setup are device snags, and you want to meet them now rather than at opening.

Step 2: Shop details, currency, tax and receipt (20 minutes)

These are the settings that print on every receipt and appear on every price, so they are worth getting right before any real sale exists.

• Shop name, address, phone. This is what a customer reads on the receipt and what they ring when something is wrong.
• Currency. Check the symbol and the decimal places actually render the way you expect.
• Tax rate, and whether your prices include it. Get this wrong and every sale from now on is wrong in a way that is tedious to unpick. If your prices on the shelf already include tax, the system must be told that.
• Logo, if you have one. Two minutes, and it makes the receipt look like your shop rather than like software. Not worth twenty minutes.

Then do the thing everyone skips: print one receipt. Not a preview on screen. An actual receipt, out of the actual printer, held in your hand. This is where you find out that the printer is not set up on this machine, or that the paper width is wrong, and you would rather find that out now.

Step 3: Load the products (60 to 90 minutes, or 10 with a file)

Now the slow job pays off.

If the system takes a spreadsheet import, use it. Download its template, paste your three columns into the matching headings, and upload. Fifty products in one go. Check five of them afterwards against the shelf, because an import that silently shifted a column is easier to spot in five products than in fifty.

If you are typing them in by hand, put on something to listen to and do it in one sitting rather than in fragments. Fragmented data entry is how you end up with the same product in twice under two spellings.

Two things to get right while you are here, because they are annoying to retrofit:

Units. Something sold by weight, volume or length is not the same as something sold by the piece. If your system understands that a bag of coffee beans is 0.75 kg but three chairs cannot be 2.5 chairs, tell it now.

Cost as well as price. If you know what you paid, enter it. Without it, the system can tell you your takings but not your margin, and margin is the number that decides whether the shop works. It is also what makes setting a shelf price something you can check rather than guess.

Step 4: Add your people (10 minutes)

One login per person. Not one login for the shop.

This takes ten minutes and it is the single highest-value ten minutes of the afternoon, because it is the whole reason a POS beats a cash box and a notebook. When a till is short, when a discount looks odd, when something got voided, the record only helps you if it has a name on it. A shared login turns every one of those into an unanswerable question.

Give people the access their job needs and no more. A cashier sells and looks things up. A manager can also see the reports and handle the awkward transactions. This is not about distrust, it is about not asking a part-timer on their second shift to make decisions they were not hired for.

Step 5: Practise the four transactions that go wrong (20 minutes)

This is the step that separates a setup from a working till, and it is the one that gets dropped when the afternoon runs late. Do not drop it.

Ring up a real basket, and then deliberately do each of these at least once, with whoever will be behind the counter watching:

1. A cash sale with change. The most common transaction in the shop. Check the change the screen tells you matches the change you would have counted.
2. A refund. The transaction that will happen when you are not there, to the person with the least training, in front of a queue. Everybody who works the till must have done one before it is real.
3. A sale where the customer changes their mind mid-basket. Remove a line, change a quantity, apply a discount. All the fiddly buttons, found once in calm conditions.
4. A sale you have to abandon and come back to. Somebody has forgotten their wallet and gone to the car. Park the basket, serve the next person, bring it back. If the system cannot do this, know that now rather than discovering it with two customers waiting.

Twenty minutes here removes almost every first-week disaster. If you are moving off an existing system rather than starting fresh, the sequencing is a bit different and there is a separate article on it.

Step 6: Stop

Resist the last two hours. There is always more: loyalty, suppliers, purchase orders, reorder points, customer records, the remaining three hundred products. None of it needs to exist before your first real sale, and all of it is easier to set up once you have a week of actual data to look at.

The correct state at the end of the afternoon is: correct tax, fifty products, one login per person, a receipt you have held, and four transactions everybody has practised. That is a working till. Everything else is improvement, and improvement can happen on a Tuesday.

Where StoreWave sits

StoreWave is built around this order rather than against it. Launching a store is a form on the website, and the first time you open the app it walks you through exactly four things: shop profile, currency and tax, your logo and colour, and inviting your team. Every step can be skipped and changed later, because a half-finished wizard should not be a state your shop can get stuck in.

Products import from a CSV with a template you can download, so the spreadsheet you prepared the night before goes in as one upload. Units are a first-class idea, so weight, volume and length behave properly rather than being pieces with a decimal point. Held sales handle the customer who went to the car, and refunds are their own permission, so you can let a new cashier sell before you let them refund.

Signing up needs an email address and no card, and the free plan covers five people and twenty products, which is enough to do the whole afternoon above and decide whether you like it.