How does DHPOS compare to real POS software.

[ZakB]

CONGRATULATIONS DALE!!!

NO OTHER POS PROGRAM CAN COMPARE TO YOURS!

ESPECIALLY FOR THE PRICE WHICH IS:

FREE!

Yup! I totally agree with bdude. I have tried several other POS systems and the one easiest to use was Dale's.
Second was Volutive (http://www.binarema.com) it came close, but the simplicity of dhpos was much better than Volutive.
The others were just so complicated, and some of them did not even work!
One point though-
the thing I like about Volutive is that there are types of receipts (Invoice/delivery order/quote) and it was easy to convert between them.

WELL DONE DALE !!!

I agree with both of you. I have been using Volutive to do our quoting and invoicing. I have been working on a interface that will let Dales POS push charges into Volutive.

[EST]

Well someone has to go first so it may as well be me.

Things I do not like about the POS system I have to use....

It takes 7 minutes to load in the morning.
I have to go into the main store office to change prices.
I cannot add new items into the stock table (only from the home office.)
I cannot make services "non-taxable" by default, I have to jump through hoops to remove sales tax from services every time I sell one.
I have to add up sales from each employee to get a total sales reading.
You cannot look up an item, if you do not know the stock number you are dead.
Which also means that you cannot view the stock table from the register.
You have to enter a "department" number for everything you ring up.
All stock numbers are 5 digits long even though I only need 3 digits and only need 1 digit for 80% of what I sell.
It does not print store information (address, phone) on the receipts.
Even though I sell keys I have to tell the register that I do not want them delivered.
"Voids" are not "clean", you have to into the office the next day to argue about how much should really be subtracted from yesterday's sales.
To find the transaction count for the day I have to subtract the opening transaction number from the ending transaction number.
Register has no calculator function.
Also no date or time on the screen.
No sale parking, if your customer cannot find her money everyone just waits or you void out the sale and start over when she can find her money.
All reductions and discounts have to be "explained" even though none of the explanations apply to the key shop.
<hr>
Things I like about my host's POS that I wish my POS would do...
Integrated credit card validation.

Could there be a way for you to add a way to make clerks explain reductions, discounts, voids, etc.? If you cannot then I can just keep it password protected, but would like my associates to be able to do it without me hovering over. If you can add the feature, could you make it so you can add your own explanations into the system so they have to pick ones set-up by the admin?

[daleadmin]

Est,

I could add it by making room by deleting another feature. But I so like the features that are already there. So probably not.

Dale

BTW, this subject is about comparing DHPOS to commercial POS software.

[Douglas]

I've used a few pieces of POS software:

1. DHPOS
2. Compris Tricon (Restaurant POS, I use this at work, ours is much uglier than the one pictured here - PDF Link)
3. MYOB RetailManager

I like DHPOS because:
1. It's simple
2. The price
3. It's laid out in a logical manner.
4. It will run on anything mage in the last 16 or so years.

I don't like DHPOS because:
1. No touchscreen
2. The beep is annoying.

Tricon is interesting, especially because it's a native Windows application, as opposed to DHPOS, which makes comparing the two tricky. So, I like tricon because:
1. Touchscreen capable!
2. It's more logical than MYOB.
3. If you know how, you can get out of it and into Windows and fiddle. (But you can do this in DHPOS anyway, provided you're running Windows)
4. It can be locked down to the nth degree.

I don't like Tricon because:
1. Our incarnation is ugly. Blergh!
2. The layout can be confusing.
3. The magical Sub button (for substituting items in meals) doesn't like being used on any item but the last one rung up.
4. Items jump around when you hit Total. For instance, you might have an X meal large, Y meal with Mountain Dew and a Z meal with no mayo on the burger, you hit total, and the customer then wants cheese on the Z meal, you hit Modify Order, and it moves everything around, making some buttons not behave well.
5. Possibly horrendously expensive. I know it's not free.
(Some of these things might be specific to where I work, so, meh).

I haven't used MYOB in ages, so it would be unfair for me to pick at it's fault, because they could have been fixed by now. But I did like it, it was just difficult to setup, although they do now have Retailbasics, which is more simpler, apparently.

[Andrew]

The beep is annoying? Do you have "key press beep" turned on? That's an option in POSCONFG.

[daleadmin]

True, it does not work with a touch screen. But read this about using "Groups" http://www.dhpos.com/postip8a.htm#rest

Dale

[Douglas]

The beep is annoying? Do you have "key press beep" turned on? That's an option in POSCONFG.

Yeah, I know about that. One of the first things I turn off, it doesn't play nice in an XP window.

[daleadmin]

And it still beeps?

Dale

[Douglas]

And it still beeps?

Dale

When you open POSCONFG, it does on each of the info screens, which annoys me greatly.

[Desphil]

Dale

I have worked on a wide range of software packages in various applications for many years, some retail store POS systems, cash registers, mainframe networked systems and hell - even a telex machine..... (if anyone remembers what those are)

When I started trying to modernize the way things work in our small farm store I did a google search for Point of sale software and came across your site. I basically said, "This is too good to be true." I was wrong. It is true - and its GOOOOOD!!!

I dont think I have ever used any POS software which is quite as well laid out, and user friendly. My 8 and 10 year old daughters both picked up how to use the software within minutes, as did my 60-something store clerk..... that speaks volumes about your software, Dale!

Now if only I could explain to them what WINDOWS is.....

[cwathen]

What I like about DHPOS is that it's written from the point of view of the people who have to use it and thus everything is well laid out and clear. No feature is added without serious throught being given to it's usability and how that will affect existing features. Whilst this seems obvious, 'real' EPOS systems don't seem to have this goal in mind, where the goal seems to be to do things in a way which suits the programmer rather than which suits the people using the software (I know you believe you do that too Dale, but actually you give a lot more thought to us poor souls than do the people who are paid to write software for their job).

Apart from experimenting, there are two main EPOS systems I've had to use at work:

Relief Manager Plus - DOS EPOS system designed specially for running a pizza shop (although it's so versatile that you could actually use it for any food business and even some non-food ones). Although notionally 'updated' by current owners Intura Solutions (copyright date in the current version is 2006) it only gets bug fixes - no significant features have been added since version 3.00 in 1997 (current version is 3.71), and the fundamentals of how it works have been unchanged since it first came out in 1991. Domino's Pizza in the UK still run this system in all of their stores (was used by the US stores until 2001 too).

Very powerful at what it does, but somewhat unwieldy and often illogical - the system is divided up into 8 separate programs which get loaded separately to access various parts of the system. In recent years they've 'helped' you by adding a windows-based toolbar to move about between the modules rather than the simple DOS text menu it used to have, although this actually makes things slower.

Falls into the trap which commercial EPOS systems always seem to fall into of the Escape key not doing what you expect. When taking an order, instead of Escape exiting out of an option, it instead attempts to cancel the entire order. Requires the remembering of lots of odd key sequences - instead of asking whether the order you're entering is for delivery or collection, the system will assume you want it delivered unless you remember to press F2 to tell it that you don't. When going on deliveries you press F1 to tell the system that you've gone but F4 to tell it that you've come back. I could go on. Has a rather odd on-screen calculator which needs to be seen to be believed - to find out 2 plus 2 you don't press 2, +, 2 but instead press 2, decimal point, enter, 2, decimal point, enter, +.

In fairness, the bits the normal people see (order taking, routing for delivery orders and makeline) aren't too bad to learn but the back office side of the system is something else - even simple things like adding new items are needlessly complicated and even the most cursory bits of analysis are accessible only from a monolithic 'custom marketing' module.

It also doesn't know what the current date is - you enter a start date when you first use the system and this gets incremented by one each time you end the day. So if you're closed for a day you have to run the end of day process an extra time or you'll be a day behind. If I'm testing it (which I do a bit of at home) and haven't run it for 3 weeks I'd need to complete the end of day process (which requires a minimum of 4 options in 2 modules) 21 times one after the other in order to advance the system on to the current date.

But RMP really only suffers from being old. Which is nothing compared to the EPOS system I use in my main job, Reference Point.

On the face of it, it's powerful stuff. It does serial number tracking, warranty tracking, can automatically generate chase letters for defaulting customers, is multi site and multi till, has a powerful report generator which lets you create your own reports on any criteria and present that data however you want rather than being restricted to what the developer has included in the program, has full accounts built in which can do payroll, can track comission and bonuses for employees, and it can track deliveries. It's also the only piece of software which the development company (Reference Point Computers) makes, so all their time and energy can be devoted to it.

However, what you get is a system which is hacked together and a nightmare to learn. Pressing the wrong key in the wrong order at the wrong time can have disasterous consequences as there is often no way of undoing what you've done.

Key sequences are beyond illogical (this is a system where you press escape to confirm things!) and it's ridden with bugs and half-completed features.

Worst of all is their shambolic testing procedures. Unlike the usual way of developing software where updates are thoroughly tested before being deployed, Reference Point will write a new update and after only the most cursory of testing will suddenly deploy it onto your system and leave you to report the bugs in it - that's right, your live system which your business runs on is frequently running beta-grade code!

This lack of proper testing has meant that on more than one occasion an update has caused something which used to work to stop working - so not only does it have bugs, but it can mutate new ones! On top of that, old ways of doing things are usually left in place after having been replaced with new ones, even though you can run in to problems if you attempt to use them (the best example probably being that on back office logins an old version of the sales screen is still freely available - but if you use it to enter a sale it won't go through properly).

It also suffers from frequent crashes and downtime - with the usual policy being to restart routers or the server and hope that it comes back up again with no real effort being made to correct these problems.

[Alan]

Finally working on EPOS equipment again.....those self service checkouts!

The biggest thing when comparing DHPOS to "real" POS software is speed! It is so quick to load, especially if you are using a MS-DOS machine!

The closest real POS program I've seen runs from DOS, connecting to a SCO-UNIX server.

I would say that maybe 50% are using IBM software with dumb terminal tills (no HDD), occasionally with a Java pos touchscreen, the rest are using XP and some are using Linux (very slow however!)

Alan

[vie_ascenseur]

I have to say, DHPOS has stacked up amazingly compared to others.

It's quick, easy, simple and damn useful. (Oh, and FREE!)
The only niggle I have with it is that the Customers feature is yet to be fully implemented. Not a major problem, but for me to implement it fully in my Mum's business, it needs this function.
Also, perhaps magnetic-swipe reader integration? i.e. read/write customer loyalty cards, gift cards etc.

Just my 2p.

Thank you so much Dale!

Joe