Proposed Enhancements - StockNos, Localisation and Others.

[Animesh]

Hi, I mailed Dale about the following features and he suggested posting it here on the forum just to see the response (as to how many ppl are interested in these things.) I would request everyone to consider each of the enhancements proposed below and consider them for future release of CashRegister. Pls let us know your views about it. Thanks.

1. The receipt printed by the software shows up Stock Numbers. There is no way we can switch it off (hide that column). Ideally, I think it should be hidden, because the stock number is generally an internal number which a company uses to track its items. Its a number in the companys database, and the customer generally has nothing to do with it - he is happy with the description. If we can switch it off someway, then we will have better alignment of items in the printed receipts. Right now, when using a 40 character wide printer setting, a single item is spread over two lines.

2. On the purchase screen it says, "Enter the stock number". There is a F1 facility which pulls up the stock table. This is really good and helpful. But when the stock table is slightly large, say about 200 to 500 items then it is difficult to use because it involves considerable amount of scrolling and manual searching - because one may not remember where is a particular item in the stock table. So you need to keep scrolling and reading. A great aid which can fasten up the process would be a "narrow-as-you-type" facility - where the stock table narrows down as you type the description. I am really excited about this facility (if and whenever it comes).

3. Lastly, this may seem a bit strange but we are also trying to include local language feature in the CashRegister. Currently, the receipt is printed in English and other alphabets which can be represented
in the extended ASCII set. What we are trying to do is print receipts in other languages - say german, french, hindi etc. So that even though the whole CashRegister works on English language, the receipts can be printed in a number of local languages. That would mean changing all the headings on the receipts, the descriptions of all items and the footer/header etc. I am not sure how it can be done, but we are exploring options. Maybe a mapping of descriptions etc in English to local language and then using a middle software layer (between the program and the windows driver) to substitute new language for the old one would work. We are not sure. Perhaps Dale (or others) have any opinions / ideas / suggestions about how this internationalisation can be done?

I think this last feature will make CashRegister a truly international program - because even though the employees in a shop can be taught English and taught to use English keyboards etc, not every customer in countries like India, China, Japan, France, Germany etc can read English receipts. Everyone, pls share your ideas about the above listed three features on this forum.

Many Thanks.
Animesh.

[Andrew]

1. Personally, I like the numbers on the receipts - if the customer calls up to ask about something on the receipt, they can read you the number.

Or if someone wants to return a rather bulky item - it is easier to type that code in than scan it - in which case the receipt would have the number on it so the clerk could hold the paper while punching in the code.

All in all I don't see any harm in having the stock code printed, to be able to turn it off and on just doesn't seem so mission critical to me. One large retailer here in New Zealand has a MASSIVE inventory, they sell everything and the stock codes are always printed on their receipts, same with many other stores I've seen.

2. Search as you type would be lovely - but very resource intensive, every letter you typed in would be an individual search, causing DHPOS to run the search code over and over for each character and re-write the list each time.

If you don't remember where something was in the stocktable use the search function after pressing F1 to search by almost any field of data (description, price, department...)

3. Uhh, you have basically described what the Receipt Language option does from POSCONFG. It allows you to rename most of the labels on the receipts. Dale has mentioned several times before this was a test for translating the program in other parts as well, but it will take a very long time to do this.

There will be problems with screen space as well - "Purchase" is 8 characters in english, but may be 15 in Swahili, if there's no room on the screen to display those 15 characters, where can we invent screen space from?

[Dale Harris]

Animesh.

Stock numbers are really useful for returns. In many cases the customer has removed the tags/stickers from the item and having the stock number on the receipt will help greatly. Also if the customer has a questions about the price charged for an item the stock number on the receipt will exactly identify the item. Even with 24 characters in the description if you have 13,000 items in your store it is possible to have 2 or more items with the same or very similar descriptions. No two stock numbers will be the same.

You can use the "Groups" feature to the divide your stock table into 20 groups and then go straight to that group to begin searching for a particular item by paging up and down. Also when using the "search" feature to search by a description you do not have to enter an exact or complete description. For example you could type in RED and then press [F1] to repeat the search until the correct item with "red" in the description will pop up.

Also it just occured to me that if you tried to use your "narrow as you type" feature but were not typing in the exact description as it is entered in the stock table then you would never find it. for example if the description for an item in the stock table is "RED INITIAL "M" KEY RING" but you start typing "L-E-T-T-E-R- -M- -K-E-Y- -C-H-A-I-N" then your "narrow as you type" feature is not going to find it.

And lastly, unless you are a restaurant, 99.856% of the items in your store should have a price tag/sticker with a UPC barcode or stock number printed on it so you should rarely have to search for an item. The register I must use at my keyshop does not have any searching features and I have no problems because all my stuff has stock number/price stickers.

Andrew,

I think what Animesh means with the "receipt language" thing is that after you ring up a sale you will be offered a menu of several languages in which you can print the receipt although Chinese and Hindi are not going to happen because they do not use the latin alphabet. The main concern here is that your local govenrment probably will want the receipt printed in the local language which is why I came up with this thing in the first place. So if you are ringing up sales in Paris you will probably be legally required to print your receipts in French even if your customer is German. Plus printing the receipt labels in multiple laguages would be mostly useless unless the descriptions were also printed in multiple languages. So then have receipt labels availible in 9 different language and also 13,000 descriptions in 9 different languages? I would not look forward to even attempting to program this and I am sure that almost no one would even consider entering over 100,000 different receipt labels and descriptions in different languages into the program. Quick, how do you say "BLACK ZIPPO LIGHTER" in Croatian?