Can You Access Your Own Cash Register Data?

jeronimo989 writes "A customer of mine has a small shop and asked me to look for an electronic cash register. One of the requirements is to retrieve the sales data from the cash register in some accessible format so he can import it in the software of his choice (which happens to be OpenOffice), either by downloading the data on a Flash card, connecting a laptop via USB, or even via a direct modem connection. As far as the cash register itself is concerned, he doesn't need anything too fancy; any 'entry level' machine for small businesses is probably OK (as long as it keeps an electronic journal, of course). Which options do we have? Are there cash register manufacturers out there that allow accessing the sales data directly in an open format? Does anyone here have experience with setting up a link between a cash register and PC, preferably using free/open source solutions?"

Comments

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even look at the page you're hawking? The features tab has only a place holder, the forum tab is utterly blank, and the manual is V 0.1.0, last updated 2004.

It really doesn't work this way...

[mridoni]

... modern cash registers simply output on a serial or USB port all the transaction data entered, and receive informations on goods for PLUs (Price Look-Ups): when a barcode on a product is scanned, the cash register "asks" to a server the corresponding price and description to be printed on your receipt, etc. Most cash registers are actually (at least here in Italy, and in a reasonably sized shop) just a specialized keyboard/screen/cash drawer connected to a PC, which in turn sits on a network: it's all part of a turn-key system, maintenance included. It's not like you go and read the data *from* the cash register: while you can query it for some daily report, you usually just store the data on a server and use some custom app or a DB frontend to read it.

Put it on the Internet

[PartPricer]

Please tell him to make it accessible via the Internet and to not encrypt his credit card data. It would make life so much easier for my Russian friends.

Ever heard of PCI-DSS?

Re:Lame

[alzoron]

Hell, he coulda have searched Slashdot alone:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/24/2012230
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/13/0116212
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/04/12/166251

Quickbooks Terminal

[Taelron]

For a couple of hundred bucks he can get a Quickbooks terminal running on embeded Xp. Then all he has to do is export the quickbooks data or just access the pc for the info. The terminals are fully functional PC's, Registers, and loaded with Quickbooks.

http://shop2.outpost.com/%7Byf7-gwJCCQm5GvlczRQ4zQ**.node3%7D/product/5380498;jsessionid=yf7-gwJCCQm5GvlczRQ4zQ**.node3?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
QUICKBOOKS 2008 POS BASIC W/HARDWARE

INTUIT:
For Windows
FRYS.com #: 5380498
QuickBooks Point of Sale Basic is a complete retail management solution that tracks inventory, sales and customer information to help you save time and serve your customers better. Includes easy-to-use software and retail hardware including a bar code scanner, cash drawer, receipt printer and credit card swipe* guaranteed to work together.**

Re:Quickbooks Terminal

[timmarhy]

ever used quickbooks? no? that's why you think it's a good idea.

Re:Quickbooks Terminal

[Kalriath]

Since when has $1,300 been a couple of hundred?

Re:Quickbooks Terminal

[Anonymous Coward]

Since before the US completly fucked their dollar. I think they're in competition with Zimbabwe.

Checkout (POS) for mac

[kalleh]

http://www.checkoutapp.com/

FYI

[WK2]

Just so everyone knows:

POS = Point of Sale
POS = Piece of Shit

For the most part, the POS's in this thread are the first choice.

Re:FYI

[dwater]

Just so everyone knows:

POS = Point of Sale
POS = Piece of Shit

For the most part, the POS's in this thread are the first choice. The actual posts in this thread, on the other hand....

Re:FYI

[87C751]

POS = Point of Sale
POS = Piece of Shit

For the most part, the POS's in this thread are the first choice.

Not after that second assignment.

Re:Lame

[xtracto]

Everytime someone posts some question on slashdot there is inevitably some idiot who will answer to "goolge it" or "source forge it" or whatever similar.

I am sure the original poster did know about goolge and maybe he even did look in there before posting here but the idea of asking in slashdot is to see what the opinions of other people with *knowledge* (supposedly) are. For me as a slashdot reader is quite interesting, because the discussion usually brings several alternatives and answers which are up to date (instead of web pages that someties are outdated) and even some comments which are worthy.

Plenty of times I have recurred to an ask slashdot that I had seen before to look at what people *in the know* are using, instead of just looking at the advertisements thrown by each of the avaialble products (either Free or non Free).

So if the only advise you are going to give is to "google it", just shut up and go to troll to the next slashdot story. You are only polluting an otherwise interesting conversation.

Maybe Stoq?

[GauteL]

I haven't tried it, since I'm not in the retail business, but Stoq is an open source Point of Sale system supported by a brazilian company called Async.

It is GTK based and uses PostgreSQL for database storage (so extracting data should be a breeze). It also comes with a LiveCD so you can try it out yourself.

Sharp

[N3Roaster]

I see a lot of comments already jumping on fancy POS systems, but if a basic cash register is really all that is needed, get to your local office store and take a look at what's there. A basic Sharp cash register (and probably registers from other makers as well) will store this data on a SD card or allow a USB connection to a computer. The software they (Sharp, don't know about others) provide is crap, but the data you get back is CSV which can be imported into any spreadsheet program. It's basic, but if that's all you need it does the trick.

Re:Sharp

[supersnail]

Mod parent down!!
He answered the OPs question.
He answered it sensibly.
He did not recommend any Freeware, Payware or Painware.
He did not even critique the operating system used.

We cannot condone such postings. What if everybody came to expect Slashdot posting to be relevent, even credible.

DataSym

[shyster]

Since nobody else seems to understand the difference between an electronic cash register and a PC based point of sale system - I'll throw in what little I know of ECRs.

DataSym makes a software product called Comm2000 that communicates with their ECRs. It can poll nightly to retrieve sales information, or you can have the register output the data on each sale. You can also maintain SKU lists, etc.

We have a few DataSym and older Sharp registers on the network (with a serial-TCP/IP device server), and the sales are captured in real time without going through Comm2000. Formats are a little obtuse, but reverse engineerable without documentation if you needed to.

Nightly, there's a fairly old version of Comm2000 that sends out SKU lists, register layouts, etc. The processing is held together with shell scripts and some custom C code, but I think Comm2000 is the standard EXE. This is all on a UNIX box, designed circa 1993, so YMMV.

Fortunately for me, but unfortunate for you, I have very little to do with the ECR side of things. But, I'd imagine most ECRs these days offer something similar, and I see DataSym still has Comm2000. Since ECRs don't really seem to be in the /. sweet spot, I'd suggest giving your local distributor a call.

Re:A suggestion

[Mathinker]

Now that I think about it, maybe that link isn't as connected as I thought... :(

I was looking more for something like this.

Too bad I can't make that post disappear by moderating the thread. :)

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

It is when the "b" is a typo.