DHES

New POS version 6.39N released on 4-2-07

HOURLY REPORT
An hourly report will print the total sales and total transactions for each hour of the specified day. Also for each hour it will calculate the sales per transaction.
When you have a sales, return, or void transaction the date/time and net sales for that transaction are recorded in a ??????.HR file. This is a permanent file and will grow without limit. This means that at any time you can make an hourly report for any day that is in the file no matter how far in the past. Since this file date/times each entry from the system clock it is again very important that your computer always has the correct date / time. If your clock is incorrect and a transaction is saved it will then be recorded in the day / time from the clock even though this may be hours, days, or years from where it is supposed to be.
In the sample print out you will notice that there are no figures for any hour that did not have sales. This means that there will be no lines for early in the morning or late at night when your store is not open. Also if there are no sales during an hour when the store is open there will be no line displayed.
Since returns and voids count as negative sales and negative transactions it is possible to have an hourly reading with negative sales and/or negative transactions. It may also be possible for the sales or transactions to cancel out so you could have sales but no transactions or transactions but no sales.
The time stamp at the left of a line indicates when the time period began. So the line for 09:00 records the sales from 09:00:00 to 09:59:59.
Actually you can set this feature to show time readings for several time intervals. An interval of 60, 30, 20, 15, 10, or 5 minutes may be selected.
<CENTER> WARNING!!!!! </CENTER>

Since the "Reports" menu has changed with the addition of "Hourly reports" this means that if you are currently using the "Automatic reports" feature when you close the register that you will have to recreate you automatic reports setup.





Download the new version here...

<CENTER> http://keyhut.com/pos3.htm </CENTER>

Dale

Dale, I haven't looked at it because I'm not interested in the feature, but I'm hoping that you can turn it off and if you do you won't get this infinite file growing like topsy on your harddrive. Right?

Dale,
I think this is great , fits in well for my business .

Thanks

Robert nel

Rollerball,

You can't turn it off but you can find the ??????.HR file in the folder and delete it whenever you want.

Dale

I'll have to be totally honest and say that I don't like this at all. Who can possibly want a permanent report on hourly sales in their business? The most you'd ever want is to be able to set up 'snap shots' every now and again to help you decide on promos, staff levels and such. You'd never have time as a manager to spend your time monitoring a constant analysis of what times of day your sales are made.

Can it not be set up as an optional toggle in confg? A lot of people who have DHPOS don't have the technical knowledge to 'look for a file and delete it off their drive'. They have the system set up to automatically run at switch on time and just switch it off when they exit the program and have run their reports. They could end up doing a lot of damage by going into the system and starting to delete files. I would never encourage it.

Just because you can do something isn't a good enough reason for doing it in my book. I personally can see little use for this. I guess an extra line could be added to the startup batch file to delete the said file but it's another complication and would be unnecessary if the feature was off as default and could be switched on by choice.

For all the complaints I get about stuff I really should be getting a paycheck for doing this. Anyway...

Maybe in a future version I will put in a button when making a hourly reading report to turn off this feature. Lord knows that the POS.EXE program could use some additional useless code.

However at least one other user named Daryl has looked at the output file for this feature and has seen some possibilities that I had not noticed. He is writing some 3rd party software to make additional reports. Too bad that if you turn off this feature that you will not be able to generate them.

Each sale logs about 45 bytes into the file. This means that if you have 100 sales per day that it will take almost 8 months to use up a megabyte. for comparison the .REC file that keeps track of previous sales is over 20 megabytes in size (for 10,000 transactions) and at 100 sales per day it would take over 12 years to get that big. If you have spare gigabyte to waste it will be used up in 60.88 years. Of course by then a terabyte of storage will be considered miniscule.

Dale

Dale,
I had hoped you would have seen how much code and disk space is being sucked up by this new feature. It isn't necessary to capture all transactions for *every* day. As Rollerball points out, you only need to capture data on the "every now" and "again" days of the week.

Personally I'm in favor of the new feature. (And I'd think many others are too who have made mentioned of this over the years in this forum). I wrote some convoluted code a while back to do this same thing. It read through the daily journals and produced the report. I can now ditch my spaghetti code and have great appreciation for this report being a part of the POS Reports.

I did a data size analysis based on my daily sales transactions (some days of the week have more sales than others) and concluded that an entire year of my transaction's data will be about 675kB.

[Bruce jumping up and down doing a happy dance]
I can now rejoice in the fact that I have a perfect use for all my 720 kB double-sided double-density disks I've had laying around since 1988! I've counted them and I'm all set for the next 27 years!!

Anyone dare to vote with your wallet?
If you think this is a great report to help run your business, send Dale $6 bucks (you did send him five when you DL the program didn't you!?).
If you think Dale wasted his time, code space, and your precious HD space, send Dale a $1 dollar as a negative vote.
If you think the new feature has completely ruined the program and wouldn't even waste a dollar, delete DHPOS from your computer. Then you'll have lots of free disk space.

Not that Dale will be influenced by any of this but at the end of 2 weeks dale can report back on the results.
My prediction is;
$6 dollar votes: 1
$1 dollar votes: 0
Deleted DHPOS: 0
In the end I'm sure, we will still have this report and Dale can at least go buy a HappyMeal at McDonalds.

Thanks again Dale,
Bruce
[Bruce going to Paypal to cast $6 vote]

So far I have received two $6 votes and no $1 votes.

If you are wondering about the code used for this feature, it takes only 8 lines of code in the POS.EXE program (out of 7595) to save the data to the file.

It takes a whole lot more in the FILEINFO.EXE program to read the file and create the report but that program is relatively small (3032 lines) and has lots of available space left.

Dale

As a solution to the problem of the ever growing file that is going to eat your computer I would suggest making two files in your favorite text editor. Make one titled pos_next.dat and inside it type filedel.bat and save it making sure it gets saved as a .dat file not a .txt like the program probably wants to. Next make another file titled, you guessed it, filedel.bat and inside it type the following "del ???.HR" of course replacing the ??? with the name that you have assigned your register files. Now save this file again making sure it gets saved as a .bat file and not .txt. Finaly move both of them to your pos folder. You can find more information on the feature that this uses in the following post http://www.dhpos.com/discuss/phpBB2/vie ... batch+file

One little thing that may need to be addressed is that I am having trouble getting this to work, when I close the register POS crashes and gives the message "File not found in line 3 of module POS2 at address 1537:4620 Hit any key to return to system" This might just be me but giving you a heads up.
-Nick