I have a client with multiple retail locations. (USA) I am wondering about the experience in how large of scale the POS and POS Awesome can go or has gone?
What are the primary differences between POS vs. POS Awesome?
Should local servers be used because of in season volume?
Client locations have up to 10 lanes per store.
We will be using PINPADs for cards with barcoding in stores and mobile devices outside.
Does anyone have an implementation similar to this?
@bkm I think is the right person to answer. Even @olamide_shodunke has excellent experience in large retail setup using OIS Awesome from what I read.
We are implementing in a similar fashion but we have chosen ERPNext POS over POSAwesome. Please DM for me more details.
I am using POS Awesome for 4 different retail locations and 10 mobile sales reps and we do it all from a dedicated cloud server.
I do not have anything near the volume of sales that you will likely have with 10 cashier lanes, but I have not found anything yet to slow me down.
POS vs POS Awesome
My clients are small to medium businesses and mostly family owned. They like to be “nimble” with their inventory. With that in mind, we chose POS Awesome because it can update inventory in near live speed.
For multiple retail locations this is a huge advantage. If a customer at one location wants something that is out of stock at one store, the sales rep can check the inventory of another store to see if it is available. This information will be live information. The store with no inventory can then call the store with remaining inventory to arrange for the sale.
With the native POS, the inventory is not updated until the end of the day when the register is closed out and all the sales of the day are processed all at once. It is at close of day that ledgers get updated and inventory is adjusted. This method leaves room for inventory to be sold out at a location during the morning and still be showing as available in the inventory system until they close out their cash register to update the inventory levels.
POS Awesome also allows for much better control of special sales and promotions. It is all built into the app and you do not have to rely on any other part of ERPNext to make them work.
With mobile sales, it is great because it helps reduce shrinkage by internal nefarious players. We allow the mobile sales reps to load their trucks from the main warehouse in the morning with a Stock Entry, but they can only save it and not “Submit” the transfer. Once saved the sales rep can hit the road to their first customer. Upon the save of the transfer, another Inventory manager is alerted to check over the sales reps load and either approve it or request more information from the driver.
If the transfer is not approved, then the driver will not be able to sell what they loaded because it will not actually show up in the inventory on their truck until approved and submitted by a manager.
With POS Awesome, a manager can actually monitor the live sales from one of the trucks if they suspect nefarious activity. They can look to see if what was loaded is actually being sold in almost real time during the day. POS Awesome along with some good internal checks and balances have helped to create a valuable and honest sales force. It also helped weed out some bad players.
Another benefit of POS Awesome is that it will process a recent sale in background while the cashier moves onto the next sale. When a cashier completes a sale, POS Awesome begins the process of updating the ledgers and adjusting stock levels to deduct the items sold from inventory. All of this does NOT slow down the cashier, because it continues to process the last sale in background while the cashier is scanning the items for the next sale.
Overall, I like POS Awesome and it has worked out very well for me. I run some pretty fast dedicated cloud servers from multiple service providers and have never had a speed problem due to system resources. However, if you are doing tons of sales transactions you will also want to purge some transaction tables in the database at least quarterly to keep the database tuned for speed.
If you do not care about the live inventory numbers throughout the day, then the native POS may suit you better. It also moves along fast by not burdening the system with each and every transaction as it occurs. All transactions get processed at the end of a shift or end of a day.
Honestly, you should set up a pair of inexpensive VPS servers for a month and test a system both ways to see which is a better fit your your style of running a retail business.
BKM
nice explanation and thank you for your sharing