[GNC] Looking for Point-of-Sale App suggestions & if any interface with GnuCash & How
Adrien Monteleone
adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Thu Nov 19 15:42:45 EST 2020
Fran, that is quite an open-ended question.
1. The best I could suggest is to research POS systems *for your
specific industry*. As someone who has evaluated and researched such
systems a few times, I can confidently say that the choices are myriad,
and a system specifically designed for your industry is usually going to
be less headache to use on a daily basis than a generic app.
Unfortunately, that generally leaves out OSS as most of those are
generic. However, some are highly customizable by design. (and being
OSS, at least the code is available to do so even if it wasn't so designed.)
Most importantly, it needs to work the way you already do without it as
much as possible. Adopting a POS where none exists most assuredly will
require some adjustment of your own daily business procedures or the
crafting of software customizations. Neither are simple, easy, or free.
(Either in money or in time.) The more adjustment or customization
needed to meld the two, the more 'expensive' that system will be.
Unfortunately, a good bit of the difference won't be discovered until
you start trying to use the new software.
2. I'm not aware of any POS specifically designed to interface with
GnuCash. What types of integration are you looking for?
3. Most POS systems can export at least a consolidated daily sales
report in CSV. Some are not so friendly because they either include, or
want to sell you, an add-on accounting module. In such a case, you might
be able to store daily reports as PDF, then use OCR or a script to
scrape the report and generate a useable CSV. Otherwise, entering data
off a physical report might be your only option, but not terrible.
More data friendly systems will let you export any report in CSV or
spreadsheet format (usually Excel) and may even let you access the data
directly via an API. (so you could write a scraper to pull data from the
POS files, then create a CSV)
A system which advertises 'exports to QuickBooks' will possibly (though
not certainly) be friendly to GnuCash.
4. See #2 & #3. Caveat: the only officially supported method for
entering or editing data in GnuCash is through the app directly, not
'behind the scenes' via other access methods to your data file. Thus
some sort of import file (like CSV) is the preferred and supported route.
Regards,
Adrien
On 11/8/20 8:31 AM, Fran_3 via gnucash-user wrote:
> 1 - What Point of Sale Apps would you sugges for a small business?(Open Source is preferred.)
> 2 - Do any interface or transfer data easily with GnuCash?
> 3 - If so what info does the POS software share?.. daily sales.. sales by item with sales by quantity and total sales dollars and/or price of each item sold... or what?
> 4 - How does the POS software share data with GnuCash?.. export CSV file to be imported by GnuCash.. or what?
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