Are you planning to start your own restaurant business, grocery store, or book shop? If yes, then you must be looking for a Point of Sales (POS) system to help manage store bills and purchases. With so many different types of POS systems out there in the market today, it’s definitely not easy to choose one. For sure a POS system has to be reliable and accurate as we are dealing with money management, order, and inventory tracking.
For those with high startup capital, choosing a POS system shouldn’t be a problem as one could easily go for branded and reputable ones such as IBM POS and Lightspeed POS for Mac OS X. But what if the cost is a problem? You’ve just paid for the renovation of the store and cannot afford to purchase a high-end POS system. There must be a cheaper solution!
What about an open-source POS / Retail Management Solution? One such system is Openbravo POS, designed specifically for touch screens. Openbravo POS (previously called Librepos and TinaPOS) is a point of sale that supports ESC/POS ticket printers, customer displays, and barcode scanners. It is multiuser providing product entry forms, reports, and charts. Openbravo POS can be configured to work in any Point-of-Sale environment.
Openbravo POS features include:
- Sales, refunds, and cash management
- Master data management
- Warehouse management
- Restaurant module
- Reports and charts
- Security
Openbravo POS supports a wide list of POS hardware including:
- Touch screens
- Bar code scanners
- Scales
- Receipt printers (Epson TM88iV, Star, Ithaca…)
- Customer displays (Epson LD110, L200…)
- Cash drawers
- Magnetic card readers
Openbravo POS is developed using Java but you can run it on various types of Operating systems.
Sample screenshots:
Openbravo POS is a system rich in features and is capable of challenging other POS systems for the retail industry. Since it is open source you can be assured of its quality. Even if the features do not suit your environment, you can always customize it or hire someone to do it for you since the software is open source. One day when I start my own retail store, I will definitely give Openbravo POS a try before even looking at any other systems out there. Download Openbravo POS
* Updated 14th Jan 2009: You may also be interested to look at a FREE to download POS software for bars and restaurants.