Duplicate Receipts & Gift Receipts

Hi.. I would also like to do something like this in our stores. I did download a gift receipt from the reports end of customer source and it does work fine. The problem is that if you do this your get a "gift" reciept for every transaction which is not what I want. I was told that RMS could do this but 2 receipts would be printed each time or I could assign one printed for one type of reciept and another for the other receipt, I did try this and it also works. The problem here is that you must assign the "ask which printer" or something like that and this would cause so much delay in ringing customers that I decided to forget about doing this.

Today I had a thought and wondered if this was possible. Could you somehow create a condition that would allow a gift receipt to be printed before/during or after the transaction? I have looked that the receipt xml's and see all kinds of conditions that decide what is printed, like credit slips, and wondered if this could work.

This is a crazy idea but maybe something like this: How about if I created a "gift receipt" item that was a non inventory item. Then program this item on my keyboard and when pressed it rang up that gift receipt item. Then a condition that printed the lines for a gift receipt when that item was rung up? I guess it would be in an "if", "then" or "else" statement of the receipt's xml. I understand these conditions but can't actually get them working too well myself.

Sorry this is so long and confusing.

John K. ( snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com)

"Catzilla" wrote:

Yes, you could do it with XML conditons like you said. The one trick behind that is you can't compare literal strings in the RMS XML templates; instead you must create a variable to hold the string, and then compare the two variables. I'm not sure why, it's just a limitation.

However, we have stores who do gift receipts and we always set them up to use Printer #2 for gift receipts, and set that printer to ask the cashier each time if they want to print it. We have found this is the besy way to do it, because it causes the cashier to ask the customer if they want a gift receipt. This helps to avoid a scenario where the cashier finished ringing up the sale, and then as the customer is about to leave they say "oh, yeah, I want a gift receipt". Now what do you do? In both types of setup (either XML Condition or Ask Printer 2) you would have to void the sale and re-do the transaction. But at least if you were prompting the cashier every time then you have a better chance of avoiding that situation.

I know at some of the department stores around here they always ask you every time if you want a gift receipt.

One other thing I should note: if you went with using the second receipt printer method, you could enable journalling on it and avoid the need to go back and re-do the transaction. Then you can just find the gift receipt the journal.

There are two minor issues with journallying your gift receipt printer tho:

1) It always journals the gift receipt, even if you didn't print it. This means you have two receipts for every transaction. Kind of a pain in the neck if you're searching for a receipt, but it might be a concern.

2) If you use the "Reprint" button it will re-print the second receipt, not the first one. Normally people expect the "Reprint" button to print the last sales receipt, not the gift receipt. The best solution here is to use Printer 1 for gift receipts and Printer 2 for regular sales receipts. Then when you do need to go back and re-print a gift receipt for someone who forgot to ask for it, you just press "Journal" and then "Page Up" to find the last gift receipt.