Proposed new feature, selling time.

[Dale Harris]

There is a cyber cafe that is using DHPOS and he has asked me to come up with something that will track the time used on the computer by each customer. I have come up with some ideas but I am trying to make it more general so that it will track anything that is sold by time.

Here is what I have so far...

The feature will be in a separate program that is accessed from the main menu of the POS.EXE program by pressing [F4].

When you enter the program you can choose to 1. Start timing, 2. End timing, 3. Set parameters, 4. Quit.

You can set up the program to either time up to 50 things (Computer #1, computer #2, computer #3, etc.) or to print out a time receipt with the start time. If a time receipt is printed the customer has to turn in the receipt when he is finished. If the thing is timed then the customer has to tell you which thing he was using.

You will be able to set the time unit. For example are you charging by the minute, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, etc.

You will be able to time to the nearest second, round out to the nearest unit, or round up to the next unit. For example if your time unit is 15 minutes and someone uses 35 minutes, rounding to the nearest unit will round to 30 minutes and rouding up will round to 45 minutes.

If you do not round, the number of units will be to the nearest 3 decimal places. For example with the time unit of 15 minutes, 37 minutes, 14 seconds would be 2.482 time units.

When you end timing a time receipt will be printed with both the elapsed time and the time units printed. To use the example above...

Computer #5
Start time 11:43:15
End time 12:20:19
Elapsed time 00:37:14
Time per 15 minutes 2.482

If your charge $1.00 per 15 minutes then in the stock table you will have a stock item like...

<pre>
STOCK# DESCRIPTION PRICE
123456 15 MINUTES COMPUTER TIME 1.00
</PRE>

When you exit the timer program it will return you to the main menu of the POS.EXE program where you can start a sale.

To ring up the sale you enter the stock number of 123456 and the "Pieces" would be 2.482 and you get this information of the printed receipt from the timer program.

Ok, what else should this program do? And as long as you are thinking about this what other things are sold by time?

Here is my list so far...

Internet time
Parking
Paintball

Pretty short list. Got anything else?

[bdude]

this is a really, really good idea.

also with the cyber cafe idea, you could have a network program that will time the user and send the results back to POS. I really hope this is included

[anwoke8204]

I think that would be a great idea as one of the things our company eventually want to get into is LAN Parties and have a LAN Party room as that is becoming quite popular. This would really help us, Thanks Dale
Andrew Stevens

[Dale Harris]

Remember that this is DOS software so being able to track the time that a computer is being used over a network is not something that I am going to be able to do. Also this is planned to be a generic timer program that will time things that are not computer related at all, like parking.

I had not planned on the output from the timer program to be imported to DHPOS. This would probably be possible but is not planned at this time. Let me get it to work first and then see what I can do for version 1.01