Guest,
The first thing to remember is that this is a cash register program, not an accounting program. It's main purpose is to calculate sales and keep track of the cash drawer, secondly to provide you with detailed information on what was sold on that day. What you have to do with the daily information is to either enter it into an actual accounting program or actual paper books.
That said, the program will exceed its mandate in many cases and report sales and mercandise figures over time periods of more that one day. But its basic accounting function is to tell you what happend in one day and you are expected to close out the register at the end of each day.
Now to your specific questions.
Q1) We sell 4 categories of objects in our business.
A1) You can enter up to 13,000 different items for sale in the stock table. By using the "Category list" you can create up to 255 different categories and assign any product to any one category.
Q2) We need an inventory management program.
I'm confused by the "close register" function. it asks to erase register merch data. why would you want to do that? when would you not want to?
A2) The program will track current inventory for any item in the stock table. It will also track the sales of any item by pieces sold and value sold for any item until you reset the merchandise data when you close the register. This means you can create a merchandise report for any ONE time period you want. If you reset daily you will be able to create a daily merchandise report, if you reset weekly you get a weekly report, etc.
Q3) And we need a sales statistics calculator.
A3) From the main menu of the POS.EXE program option "8. Reports" will create sales and merchandise reports. There are many options for both a sales report and a merchandise report that are listed here
http://keyhut.com/postip8.htm#8
The main thing to remember is to create your reports before you reset the information by closing out the register.
Q4) How do users log on and off?
A4) You can't. However by using employee PIN numbers you can be pretty sure of which employees did what.
Q5) I want sales data to be kept for payment methods, items, categories. i see that stuff is there, but doesnt save if merch data is erased.
A5) By looking at the "reports" feature you will see that you can get "whole store" sales figures, including payment methods, for any time period you specify as long as the register is closed out at the end of each day. For employees you can only get their current sales figures. For merchandise you can create a "history" report. This will tell you how many pieces were sold and value sold from the 1st of any past month to the current day however you can only go back 12 months.
Also note that any report, or any portion of the stock table, can be exported to a text file that can then be loaded into any word processing program o you can export to a data file that can be loaded into any spreadsheet or database program. Once you load the information into a word processing, spreadsheet, or data base program, go nuts. You can create any type of report that you and your software are capable to create.
For really detailed information on the whole program you can look at the online user's guide here
http://keyhut.com/posmenu.htm or you can download the MS Word version here
http://keyhut.com/register.doc