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POS 2009 General Questions

We are considering using POS 2009 for a small, 2-lane beer/wine specialty shop. I have been debating on RMS vs POS 2009 for a while, and it seems that POS 2009 can do everything that we need it to do. This will be a single store environment. Here are the questions that I have:

  1. We definetely need to be able to support case breakdown. Can someone explain how this works in POS 2009? Ideally, I would like to scan a "case" of wine, and break that down into 6 individual bottles. I would like to present two SKU's on the barcode, one for purchasing a case, and one for purchasing a bottle. Is this possible?

  1. How is the physical inventory process in POS 2009?

  2. How hard would it be to implement a customer incentive program? ie, we give them a card to track their sales and offer some type of discount/incentive to these customers.

  1. I plan on having 2 POS registers connecting to a Windows 2008 server with the SQL server. From what I have read, POS 2009 does not play nicely in a domain, especially if it runs on the domain controller. Does anyone have experience in this area?

  2. What is the easiest merchant to support within POS 2009? I seem to see "Mercury Systems" popping up all over the place.

  1. What are Microsoft's long term goals for POS 2009? I don't want to buy in to a product that will be gone in the next 3-5yrs. Are there currently any options for multi-store HQ-ish implementations for POS 2009 or any planned by MS or third parties?

  2. How is the integration with QuickBooks? I have heard mixed things.

Thanks for taking the time to help me out with these questions.. I really appreciate it!

Thanks,

Josh

Reply to
Josh
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Josh, I have had POS 09 since day 1 & never had RMS, so I can?t actually speak to RMS but as for POS09, here goes:

1: I have tried to sell products using your idea and my inv. ALLWAYS ends up messed up. POS seems to support this but not well. 2: Physical Inv. For me, has been a nightmare. I?m not sure how MS expects anyone that has more than a few hundred items, from a dozen or so suppliers or so, to use their built in Inv. Report. 3: I have a customer loyalty card program in my store, POS makes this pretty easy, however, doing any kind of rewards tracking, not so great. Hero Points is working on a plug in, but to my knowledge that?s it. You can track your customers, the purchases they make & give them a designated discount but that?s about in from within POS. 4: POS WONT run on domain controller. Also, if you are running 64bit SQL on that server (I was) No go either. No reports function when running on SQL x64. I had to go back to x86. 5: I have heard good things about Merc. Also, I?m using NPC & haven?t had a single problem. POS plays well with other merchant services also. 6: I hear they have ?Big Plans? for it, as far as supporting 09 & I?m dying to see them! 7: The ?integration? with QB is nonexistent. POS says it supports this but don?t expect anything more than an import of your data from POS into QB. (Another personal experience) Having seemingly trashed POS09 on the surface, I think when it is TRULY READY for release(and it is not), it will be a good product, until then, take all the advice that I?m sure you will get on this site and go with RMS or another product!

Thanks! David D. L.S.B.

"Josh" wrote:

Reply to
David D.

Hi David,

Thanks for the info! Regarding the case breakdown, I think I have it working in my POS 2009 demo. This is how I am doing it:

I have two items in my database, a "Case" of wine, and "bottles" of wine. When a case arrives, I increase the quantity of the "case" by 1, and leave the "bottle" qty at 0. In the bottle's properties, under case breakdown, I choose the "case" as it's parent and specify that there are 6 bottles in a case. When I sell one bottle, POS will split the case open, reduce the case on hand qty by 1, selling one bottle out of the case and leaving 5 individual bottles to sell. It seems like it works fine.. what problems were you seeing?

Now that you mention it, I am having trouble running the sales reports. I am currently running SQL Express 2008 on Windows 7 and receive this error:

Unable to retrieve report data for the report. Error details: The conversion of a nvachar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.

Is this the same problem that you were experiencing?

I have been told that a third party is currently developing a HQ-ish multi-store product for POS 2009 and it will be a monthly service. Apparently it works better than the original RMS HQ.

There is also a third party QuickBooks module for POS 2009 that adds LOTS of functionality to POS 2009 in terms of QB integration. I have not used it yet.

I am still torn between RMS and POS 2009. From my testing so far, POS seems to work well with the exception of the reporting problems that I am having. I -really- like POS' interface much better than RMS' but I know thats the wrong way to decide between the two. Did POS 2009 SP1 fix any of your issues?

Thanks,

Josh

"David D." wrote:

Reply to
Josh

The error you are getting is probably because of your Date Time format. Go into Control Panel --> Regional Settings --> Customize this format... --> Date tab Check your Short Date format make sure it is dd/MM/yyyy. Then try again.

Reply to
rarmstrong

Also check your locale is en-US

Reply to
rarmstrong

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