Costing method and other questions

[mjzyaad]

Hello,

Lately, I have developed an interest in Point of Sale systems and DHPOS is one of the best product out there on the market. I must say that DHPOS is a reference! Thank you Dale and appreciate much your courage and dedication for the application.

I have also a few questions.. can you please help me in sorting them out:
1) does DHPOS support costing methods (Average price, LIFO, FIFO)? Or does it simply consider the latest buying price assigned to a specific product?

2) Let's say that a customer returns an item, which was sold at $10.00 to him. When he returns the item, the selling price of the item is now $12.00. Is there a way to make the program take the price that was assigned when the product was first sold, that is 10.00 instead of 12.00?

3) Will DHPOS one day be open sourced (like PHP POS) so that we can modify the program and adapt to the business needs?

Thanking you in advance.

Cheers!

[daleadmin]

mjzyaad,

1. The program uses whatever you type in as the price. It does not calculate the price.

2. If someone wants to return something, and there has been a price change since the item was purchased, then the person ringing up the return will have to enter the price that was paid when the item was purchased.

3. Many things in the program must remain hidden, even from the store owner. Things like passwords, PIN numbers, sales totals, tax receipts, etc. While for some of those things amounts must not be hidden (you need to know how much tax was collected) the way they are stored in the files must be hidden (your tax buddies will not want you to be able to change the amount of tax collected.) Therefore there will never be an open source version of this software.

Dale

[mjzyaad]

Thanks a lot for clarifying Dale.

Cheers!

[mjzyaad]

I re-open the discussion linked to the costing method.

As the application will work only with the latest buying price of a product, is there any way to have a more precise profit report?

Any tips you guys can share?

Thanks a lot!

[daleadmin]

mjzyaad,

The only place that records the price for an item is the price column in the stock table. So it would not be possible to find previous prices or when the prices changed.

Dale

[brucef2112]

mjzyaad,
I think one could get a pretty good costing with DHPOS' data and some coding to create some automated processes. I don't have a need to do this, so I haven't. But I've thought about it, and in theory if you automated daily backups of files that have changed each day, one could write a automated program to search the stock table for cost price, regular price and sale price changes, and capture the in stock count, the cost and sales price. I think you would also want to set auto reports of E.Total by Stock to save as data file.

This would get you close to an accurate report if done monthly or quarterly. Of course the fudge factor would be on a day that the Cost changed and there were several of the same items sold both before and after the price change that same day. There is no data in DHPOS that could differentiate the new cost to old cost for the same day. So you'd have to build a rule how your automated report tool would handle this. But most of the time you're going to have Cost changes and often not sell the item the same day (seems to be in my case, YMMV).
It would be a huge improvement compared to running the profit report built into DHPOS.Note:Dale hates it and only put it in because users threatened to harm his cat. Maybe not. Go here to find out.New POS version 6.39P released on 4-5-07

I'm in the Windows XP world so the Automation of a End Of Day Backup can be done with DOS commands and Windows Scheduler.
Using XCOPY with the /M switch just copies files that have changed. As long as no other backup software is running that would affect the Archive flag of files, the first time this command line was run it would copy everything in the POS. After this, subsequent runs of the exact same command line (with a different destination name so the previous one doesn't get overwritten) would copy only the data files because they would typically be the only files that got modified or created by the POS after the first run.
Check out this post for more info on automated backups. Dated Full & Incremental BACKUP In a Batch File Examples

The Auto Reports setup is well documented in DHPOS. You'd need the daily E.Total by Stock report saved as data.

Reading the stock table is one thing that is "open" and documented. Stock Table File Format

The coding is the bigggy. (Average price, LIFO, FIFO) lots of rules, things to compare, things to cross check, and more stuff than I want to think about right now.
This could be coded in almost any language. It doesn't have to be in QB as you are going to be working with standard binary files and CSV files. Pick your poison & pull your hair. This is not an easy coding project.