What Should I Consider When Buying a Cash Register?

The cash register is a multifunctional computer equipment used in commodity retail enterprises, restaurants, bank counters and other departments to handle counter business. The electronic cash register can store the unit price of goods, inventory information, and print sales reports. Its interface is connected to external devices such as magnetic card readers, bar code readers, bill printers, electronic scales, and so on. It is an indispensable tool for managing cash income, a product of the combination of electronic technology with modern management concepts and technological development, and one of the basic electronic equipments necessary for modern and automated business management.

1. Faster and more accurate business receipts, reduce errors, improve service quality and business files

Cash Register ^[1]

(1) Classified by hardware structure ^[2]

According to the payment method, it can be divided into the following categories:

The first is a cash register, which mainly supports cash collection services;

The second category is IC card cash registers, equipped with a card reader, which supports UnionPay cards (saving cards, credit cards) and ordinary IC cards (stored value cards, membership cards, meal cards, etc.);

The third category is the cash register that supports mobile payment, which mainly supports the latest bar code (two-dimensional code) payment currently launched.

Most cash registers support both cash collection and IC card collection.

Consider demand, structure

When choosing the structure of a product, an enterprise should first consider its needs based on its business format. Supermarkets and supermarkets should use flexible split POS cash registers; concise all-in-one machines should be used in specialty stores and convenience stores; department stores and shopping malls can choose according to space.

According to the selection of the system platform of the foreground software being run, if the foreground software runs on an embedded system, the requirements for the cash register's CPU, memory, and hard disk are relatively low. If the foreground software runs on a windows platform, you should choose a dual-core CPU and more than 1G of memory, otherwise the high-cost configuration may be too high and increase the useless cost, or the configuration may be too low to ensure that the foreground software runs normally. At the same time, the power consumption of the CPU should be considered. The power consumption of ordinary CPUs must exceed 30 watts, while the power consumption of low-power CPUs is less than 10 watts. The CPU is an important heat source in the cash register. If the temperature is too high and poor heat dissipation may cause the cash register to freeze. Therefore, you should choose a low-power CPU.

Investigate performance and quality

The performance and quality of the product itself are important indicators of the cash register. The performance indicators that purchase companies should pay attention to are the external bus and external interface capabilities of the motherboard, the CPU's main frequency and power consumption, and the overall power consumption and thermal design.

There are many types of cash register motherboards. The external bus bandwidth is 33MHZ, 66MHZ, 100MHZ, 133MHZ, etc. The higher the external bus bandwidth, the faster the cash register will run.

Most of the cash register's motherboards have more than 4 serial ports, one or two parallel ports, cash drawer ports, Ethernet ports, keyboard ports, mouse ports, USB ports, etc. As the needs of commercial enterprises change frequently and the functions of cash registers are often expanded, products with many external interfaces should be selected. When considering the product structure, the main frequency and power consumption of the CPU have been involved. If it is not for the needs of special services, a low-power CPU is sufficient.

The most important operation of the cash register is stability. If it crashes, it will cause customers to wait in long lines. Therefore, try to choose a product with low power consumption as much as possible to eliminate the cause of the crash. Another willingness to pay attention to the power consumption of the cash register is that the use environment of the cash register is poor, and the ventilation is poor. Therefore, the heat dissipation design of the cash register must be considered, especially in the southern high temperature area.

Assess prices and costs

The cost of a product usually includes the cost of purchase and use. The prices of mainland brands and Taiwan's products are between 3000-10000, and the prices of imported machines are quite different, maybe between 10,000 and 30,000. It should be said that the quality of foreign famous brands is better than the quality of mainland and Taiwan products, but the gap is not large. The failure of POS machines mainly occurs in printers, motherboards and keyboards; most motherboards use dedicated POS motherboards with high reliability, and the products have higher reliability. Therefore, for enterprises with poor financial strength, domestic-made machines with higher cost performance are a better choice.

The cost of consumables such as printing paper and ribbon of the cash register is a daily expense, which is also a problem to be considered when selecting a printer. In addition, in terms of use (training) costs, simple equipment and software should usually be used. Because the payees are more mobile, newbies often appear. If the operation of the selected product is complicated (including application software), it will increase the difficulty of use and training time. At the same time, if the operation of the cash register is complicated, the efficiency of the cashier in the process of collecting money will be reduced, the waiting time of the customer will be longer, and the labor intensity of the cashier will increase accordingly.

Any mechanical product needs to be maintained and maintained after a certain trial period, so maintenance costs must be considered before purchasing the product. Generally speaking, the maintenance cost of imported brands is high (international practice, personnel cost), and the maintenance cost of mainstream manufacturers in mainland is low. General product maintenance costs (material plus labor) account for approximately 8% of the purchase price in the second year, approximately 12% of the purchase price in the third year, and approximately 15% -20% of the purchase price in the fourth and fifth years According to the calculation period of 5 years, the total equipment maintenance cost should be more than 0.5 times of the purchase price, and the imported products may be higher. Therefore, businesses should fully consider maintenance costs when purchasing cash registers.