Updated 1-27-17
Cash Register

Moving & Exporting & Importing stock table lines
WARNING: DO NOT CHANGE THE ORDER OF THE STOCK TABLE WHILE OTHER COMPUTERS ARE USING THE STOCK TABLE OVER A NETWORK!

To move lines in the stock table press [F5] for "Move / Export lines." You will now be offered the option to "Backup the stock table." This is a truly wonderful idea. When making wholesale changes in the order of your stock table it will be quite easy to screw up your stock table beyond all comprehension. Then the only way to have a stock table again will be either to restore it from the backup or type in the entire stock table again from nothing. Trust me, restoring from a backup is the easier of the two options.

1. Select/Unselect lines 5. Copy to clipboard.     [CTRL]+[^] Move up
2. Add blank lines here  6. Paste from clipboard.  [CTRL]+[v] Move down
3. Delete selected lines 7. Export to printer/database/spread sheet.
4. Sort stock table      [SPACEBAR] Select/Unselect this line only.

                       "Move/Export" menu options.

When the menu above is at the bottom of the screen you can use the following options. If you hold down the [CTRL] key and then press either the up or down arrow keys the current line will move up or down in the stock table.

Press the [SPACEBAR] to select the current line or unselect it if it is already selected.

Press [1] to select lines just by using the up and down arrow keys. You can also enter "search" terms and all lines in the stock table that match will be selected. Note when searching for descriptions or vendor stock numbers any partial match will be selected. For example if you are searching for "RING" then "DIAMOND RING", PISTON RINGS", "LORD OF THE RINGS", "KEYRING", will all be selected.

Press [DELETE] and all selected lines will be unselected.

Press [2] to add blank lines at your current location in the stock table. Lines after your current location will be moved back. Warning; if there are not enough blank lines at the end of the stock table (equal to or more than the numbers of lines you are adding) then the program will not add lines and this procedure will be canceled.

Press [3] to delete selected items from your stock table. You may choose to just remove the lines leaving blank lines in their place or to move up the following lines to fill in.

Press [4] to sort the stock table. You may choose to sort the entire stock table or you may enter a range of lines and only the lines between the "begin" line number and the "end" line number will be sorted. All other lines will remain in their current location. WARNING; when the program sorts lines, all lines in between "begin" and "end" with a stock number of zero will be erased. You may sort by any field in the stock table like stock number, description, price, tax rate, inventory, anything. Sorting by either description or vendor stock number is not case sensitive, i.e. "a" = "A". You may sort in either increasing order (A --> Z, 1 --> 9) or decreasing order (Z --> A, 9 - -> 1). If items in your sort field are the same (for example you are sorting by price and many items have the same price) then like items will be further sorted by stock number.

Press [5] to move all selected lines into the clipboard. You may either make a new clipboard or copy to the end of the current clipboard. After you copy to the clipboard you will be offered the option of deleting the selected lines from the stock table. This is a good idea. If you do not delete and then later copy the clipboard to the stock table then you will have multiple twins of lines in the stock table. The POS program will not allow you to leave the "Move / Export lines" function if you have multiple lines with the same stock number. You will have to search each twin one at a time and either delete it or change the stock number or restore your stock table from the backup. It will be much easier to delete the selected lines now. This is also a problem if you copy the same lines twice into the clipboard and then paste the clipboard into the stock table. Once again you will have twins in the stock table.

Press [6] to paste the clipboard to your current location in the stock table. You may either overwrite the current lines with the clipboard or move back the current lines of the stock table to make room for the clipboard contents. Warning; if you choose to move lines back and there are not enough blank lines at the end of the stock table (equal to or more than the numbers of lines you are pasting) then the program will not paste lines and this procedure will be canceled.

Press [7] to export lines from your stock table to either a printer, a text file that can be loaded into any word processing program, or a data file that can then be loaded into any spreadsheet or database program.

When exporting you may export all lines, all selected lines, or all lines with non-zero stock numbers. You may choose only those fields you wish to export and the order in which you wish to export them. You may choose to export information on your merchandise as LINES or SHELF TAGS. "Lines" will export the fields for each item on one line.

If you choose to export "shelf tags" you will have several options. "Custom" will print each field on a separate line in the order you have chosen. A label will proceed the data on each line except for the "stock number", "description", and "vendor stock number" lines.

3713541354121
IMPORT RUBBER GRIP KEY
PRICE: 4.29
INVENTORY: 236
COST: .89
XFG4154141HDSDH41

Sample custom tag.
"Price" tags will print only the stock number, description and price on a tag no matter what fields you have chosen.

IMPORT RUBBER GRIP KEY 3713541354121 REG. 4.29 Sample price tag.
"Sale" tags will print only the stock number, description, regular price and sale price on a tag no matter what fields you have chosen. However if the item has a sale price of 0.00 then a "price" will be printed instead of a "sale" tag even though you have selected to print "sale" tags.

IMPORT RUBBER GRIP KEY 3713541354121 REG. 4.29 Sale 3.99 Sample sale tag.
There are several format options for shelf tags...

"## Lines from the top of one tag to the top of the next tag." You must set this correctly to start printing at the top of each tag on the sheet. You must make sure that you have set the number of lines to equal or greater than the number of lines on a tag.

"# Tags per row. (How many across?)" If your sheets of tags are placed 2 across on the sheet then you will probably want to print 2 across tags.

"## Tag width. (In characters.)" From the left edge of one tag to the left edge of the tag next to it how many characters must you print?

"## Left margin. (In characters.)" This shifts tags to the right.

"# Top margin. (In lines.)" This will shift tags down the page.

"## Printed lines per page" (If zero, printing will be continuous,) No "page feed" if zero.

"# Bottom margin. (In lines.) Blank lines at the bottom of the page.

"Justification." You may choose to justify your tags to the LEFT, CENTER, or RIGHT.

Since shelf tags have many settings you will probably want to "[F7] See sample output" before you actually begin exporting tags. Be careful, this program assumes that you know what you want to do and if you select to print 78 tags wide with 81 characters to the next tag and 64 lines per tag then the program will actually try to do this. The results will not be pretty and will use up a whole forest of paper. Or the program will just die.

You may export as TEXT or DATA. TEXT may be sent to the printer or as a disk file that can be loaded into any word processing file. After loading a TEXT file into your word processing program make sure that you change the font to COURIER (in your word processing software) otherwise the columns will not line up. DATA files are saved as "comma delimited" files and may be loaded into any spreadsheet or database software. NOTE: in DATA files, quotes (") in "descriptions" and "vendor stock numbers" will be changed into double apostrophes (' ').

Importing
It is possible, although difficult, to import a stock list into your stock table from either a word processing, spreadsheet, or database program.

The data from one of these programs must be saved as a plain text, comma delimited document with the extension of .TXT, for example DOCUMENT.TXT.

Here is a sample file as it would appear in a word processing program...

22532,"ROCKS ", 23.21,1, 23.00, 2563.21, 252, 1, 20
96585222,"STONES ", 52.21,2, 5.20, 12,00, 16, 18, 52
84,"BRICKS ",,,18.20,5,91.00

There are a LOT of rules.

The data on each line must be in this order...
1. Stock number (14 digit maximum, numbers only)
2. Description (24 characters max.)
3. Regular price (9999.99 max.)
3. Sale Price (9999.99 max.)
5. Tax chart (0 - 9 only)
6. Pieces sold (99999.99 max.)
7. Dollars sold (9999999.99 max.)
8. Inventory (99999.99 max.)
9. Category (0 - 255 only)
10. Vendor (0 - 255 only)
11. Cost (9999.99 max.)
12. Model stock (99999 max.)
13. Pack (9999 max.)
14. Vendor stock number (30 characters max.)

You do not have to have all 14 fields but they MUST be in the proper order and you may not skip any. For example if you want to enter only the first 7 fields you MUST enter all fields from 1 to 7, you CANNOT skip field 5 (or any other field from 1 to 7) and only enter fields 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, & 7.

Fields MUST be separated by a comma (,).

If the description contains a comma (,) it must start and end with a quote (") AND the right quote MUST be immediately followed by a comma (",). For example "PAIR OF SOCKS, RED ",

Excel
If you have MS Excel there is an Excel spreadsheet STOCKTABLE.XLS that comes with this program. It is a blank formatted stock table that you can use to create a text file that can be loaded into the stock table. It would be a good idea to make a copy of this spreadsheet before you make any changes in it. Fill in the data into the Excel file and then save it as a "CSV (comma delimited)" type file.

The descriptor on the second row of each column tells you about the data that goes in each column. If you have a descriptor of 000.00 then you may enter a number in that column from .00 to 999.99. Remember that the leftmost column has to be numbers only even though it is a text column. The rightmost column may have any characters.

DO NOT ENTER COMMAS IN TEXT CELLS UNLESS YOU ENCLOSE THE CELL IN QUOTES!!!

You do not have to fill in every column, columns not filled in will be either blank or zeros when this file is loaded into the stock table. Rows that do not have a valid stock number greater than zero in the leftmost column will not load into the stock table. Remember that this spreadsheet will NOT be your actual stock table, it is only a way to load data into your stock table.

You may also copy & paste data into this file from another spreadsheet that you may already have however you must copy only one column at a time if the columns in the other spread sheet are not in the correct order. If you copy the data you must make sure that data type has not changed. To check if it has select one of the column entries, on the tool bar near the top of the Excel screen click on [Format] then [Cells] then [Number]. All columns that do not have a decimal point in the descriptor on the second row must be of the "Text" data type. For columns that need a decimal point click on [Custom] and the data type must be "0.00". If the data type has changed select the entire column and the repeat the steps above to select either "text" or "0.00".

Loading the file
You enter your file into the stock table by first loading it into the clipboard. From the stock table press [F5] (Manipulate / Export lines) (at this point you may make a backup of your current stock table, a WONDERFUL idea!), then [1] (Continue), then [4] (Copy selected lines into the clipboard), then [5] (Erase current clipboard and copy from text file to make new clipboard.) Now enter the disk drive that the file is on and the name of the file and press [ENTER] to load the file. You will now be required to view the contents of the clipboard. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Make sure that all of the data from your text file has loaded correctly into the clipboard. Check every line and both pages. If the data was improperly loaded or corrupted in the clipboard then when you load the clipboard into the stock table it could corrupt the existing stock table making it totally unreadable by the POS software. Do you want to retype you entire stock table over again?

After you have finished checking the contents of the clipboard press [ESC] twice and you may now move the cursor to where you wish to load the clipboard into your stock table and then press [6] (Paste lines here from clipboard.)

It is a REALLY GOOD IDEA to make several dry runs of this feature into a new, empty stock table before attempting this on the stock table you are using.

The most common errors in importing a file is if the file has an extra or missing comma (,) then the data that is supposed to be in one field will show up in a different field or if the value is out of the allowable range the value will be zero, all of the following fields on that line will also be shifted to another field. The other common error is if the "description" field contains a comma (,) and is not contained in quotes (") or the right quote is not immediately followed by a comma, ie. there is a space between the right quote and the following comma.

If you save your data file from your word processing software in a format other than plain text or "DOS text" or from your spreadsheet or database program in a format other than comma delimited, then a lot of formatting data will proceed the actual stock data and the import function of the POS program will not be able to find the actual stock data.

Tax Rates
To set up a tax table for your register use the "Tax rates" function in the POSCONFG.EXE program. You may also edit the tax table from the register program without a password, if you wish to prevent this, set "Should a sales person be allowed to change the tax rates without using a password." to "NO" and enter a password.

You may enter the tax rates into two columns. If your location has only one tax for each separate item then only fill in the LEFT column. If your location has two tax rates for each separate item, for example a federal tax and a local tax, and the different taxes must be tracked separately, then you must fill in both columns. Fill in the LEFT column for the federal tax and the RIGHT column for the local tax.

To change the text on the receipt from "TOTAL TAX" to something else like "TOTAL PST COMPONENT" you must enter the new text at the top of the proper column on the tax table.

TOTAL TAX        TOTAL PST COMPONENT -- Print on receipt

1  8.750         1  5.000 -- General merchandise tax rate
2  2.000         2  2.000
3  5.500         3  4.750
4  0.000         4  0.000
5  0.000         5  0.000
6  0.000         6  0.000
7  0.000         7  0.000
8  0.000         8  0.000
9  0.000         9  0.000

(Tax column 1)   (Tax column 2)

Tax set up screen.


The "tax total" section of a single tax receipt will look like this...

           SUB TOTAL        19.55
TAX1 at  8.750%        1.23
TAX2 at  2.000%         .01
            TOTAL TAX        1.24
                TOTAL       20.79

The "tax total" section of a double tax receipt will look like this...

           SUB TOTAL        36.40
TAX1A at  8.750%        1.22
TAX2A at  2.000%        0.45
TAX1B at  7.000%        0.98
TAX2B at  1.000%        0.22
TOTAL GST COMPONENT          1.67
TOTAL PST COMPONENT          1.20
                TOTAL       39.27

In the tax rate table enter the general merchandise tax rate for your location as tax rate #1. (In one or both columns.) For example if food at your location is taxed at 2% and medicine is taxed at 1.5% and gasoline is taxed at 8% and everything else is taxed at 5% then you will enter 5.000% as tax rate #1. The other tax rates will be entered as rates #2 to #9.

If you run this program without a stock table, tax rate #1 is the default rate that will be used when you ring up an item on the register, You would want the most common rate to be the default.

You may change the settings above from the POS.EXE program. However if you use the "Tax rates" feature in the POSCONFG.EXE program you will have several additional functions to set.

TAX TYPE
There are two ways to display tax in a sale. Tax ADDED displays the price on each line on the receipt without tax. Tax INCLUDED displays the price on each line on the receipt with tax.

Tax ADDED at end of sale     Tax INCLUDED on each line

ZODIAC KEY CHAIN    10.00    ZODIAC KEY CHAIN     11.00
BRASS KEY ONE SIDE   2.00    BRASS KEY ONE SIDE    2.20

         SUB TOTAL  12.00              SUB TOTAL  13.20
              TAX    1.20        INCLUDES TAX OF   1.20
            TOTAL   13.20                 TOTAL   13.20

Why is the tax sometimes off a penny when using "INCLUDED" tax? Actually either the tax or sometimes the totals may be off a penny. When you use ADDED tax, and an item is priced at 5.00, then the price is exactly 5.00. However when you use INCLUDED tax the real price of an item is 5.00 minus the tax. For example, if the tax rate is 8.75%, then a 5.00 item is really 4.5977011 plus a tax of .4022989.

The program however only keeps track of the price to .00001 so the last .0000011 is not tracked. If you sell many items, or in some cases only a few, this rounding error can pop up.

TAX ON TAX
If you have two tax rates on each item does tax #1 tax only the merchandise or the merchandise + the tax #2 on the merchandise? For example if the item is 10.00 and each tax is 10%, how is the tax calculated?

(10.00 X 10% = 1.00) + (10.00 X 10% = 1.00)=10.00 + 1.00 + 1.00=12.00

Or

(10.00 X 10% = 1.00) + (11.00 X 10% = 1.10)=10.00 + 1.00 + 1.10 = 12.10

The second example is tax on tax. You may have either tax put tax on the other tax, or neither, but not both.

FRACTION OF A PENNY ROUND UP.

Tax on a sale is not usually an even amount. For example if you have a 1.00 item with a tax rate of 8.75 then the total sale amount is 1.09. However that is not the real amount. The tax is actually .0875 cents and and the total is really 1.0875. Since most countries do not have a coin that is less than a cent this is rounded to 1.09.

Most places use 4/5 rounding meaning that if the fraction of a penny is .00 of a penny to .49 then the extra is dropped. If the fraction of a penny is .50 of a penny to .99 then the tax is rounded up to the next penny.

To set this program for 4/5 rounding set "Fraction of a penny." to ".50". To round up any fraction of a penny to the next penny set "Fraction of a penny." to ".01", etc.

UNIT TAX
A unit tax is a sales tax that is charged per item. For example if you sell a bottle of wine there could be a 1.50 per bottle tax. When you are in the "Tax" column of the stock table you can press [F7] to enter a unit tax for that item. Then when you sell the item the unit tax will be charged for each one of that item you sell. Any item may have both a percentage tax and a unit tax.

(See "Stock Table")

Ticket sales
This program will sell tickets to just about anything, stage shows, movies, airline, train, stadium, theme park, etc. Tickets can be for something today or dated tickets for something in the future. Tickets can be sold as general admission (you have 100 seats, sell 100 tickets, and everyone finds their own seat) or you can sell individual seats (Main floor, Row G, Seat 8).

This feature was originally written for selling theater tickets. If you are selling tickets for something else you can probably make the adjustments. A "venue" can be a theater, stadium, aircraft, train car, boat, etc. An "event" can be a performance, flight, departure, etc.

You can sell tickets for different things using the same setup, meaning that can sell airline tickets in one transaction and theater tickets in the next transaction. However the venues must be yours. You can sell tickets to Bob's Airlines (because you are Bob) but you will not be able to sell tickets to United Airlines because they have their own ticketing system.

There is no limit on the number of different venues that you may have. The same venue may have multiple seating / pricing layouts. The same venue may sell admission by individual seats or general admission depending on the particular event.

The program will keep track of which seats are sold and unsold.

However there are limits. If you sell individual seats your seating plan must fit into a grid of 78 X 100 seats. If you sell seating by section (different prices by section) you cannot have more than 9 sections. If you sell tickets by type (regular admission, child, senior, discount, whatever) you cannot have more than 5 different types. If you sell seats by general admission each section can have a maximum of 10,000 seats.

The program will print receipts and tickets on the same printer or you can print receipts on one printer and tickets on another. Note: to sell tickets, the main POS program must be set to use a stock table and the stock numbers used for tickets must be in the stock table.

SETUP
As you can see the list of ways you can sell tickets is very flexible. But this does mean that you are going to have to do some setup to get it to work the way you want. To setup ticketing go to the "Ticket sales" feature of the POSCONFG.EXE program. You will see this menu...

1. Create an event
2. Layout venue seating
3. Printer setup
4. Unlock all venue files
5. Delete an event
6. Ticket sales reports

The first thing you must do is press [TAB] until the line under the menu reads "[TAB] Allow ticket sales." If the line reads "[TAB] No ticket sales." then you will not be able to sell tickets even if you have done everything else to set up ticket sales.

PRINTER SETUP
Just to get it out of the way choose "Printer setup" first. You may choose to use your receipt printer to print tickets or to print tickets on a separate printer attached to your computer. Even if you are using the same printer as the one you use to print receipts you must set up printing for the tickets. It is basically the same setup as for printing receipts so view those instructions. However, even if you are going to use the exact same setup on the same printer to print both receipts and tickets you must do the "printer setup" for the "Tickets" feature.

SELLING TICKETS
The way the program works is that you describe the venue to the program (a seating layout) then you create events for that venue. An event will have the date / time of the event and the different prices for admission. An event can also be a flight on an airplane or a sporting event or just about anything. You can use the same seating layout for an unlimited number of events, after all you do not want to make up a seating grid for each event.

Once you have created a seating grid and matched it to an event with all the pricing information, you can then begin selling tickets to that event.

LAYOUT VENUE SEATING
Using the option "Layout venue seating" will allow you will create a seating chart for your venue. You may create several venues for use so you must name each venue file. You can also have different seating plans in the same venue. For example, for some events you may not allow seating in the balcony, or set up chairs on the stage, or have all seats the same price. To do this you must save the same venue as separate venue files like BIJOU1.THR, BIJOU2.THR, BIJOU3.THR, etc. However for the same seating plan in the same venue you will only have to create one file even though you may have several different events in that venue with that seating plan.

There are two ways you can sell seats. You can sell seats as "general seating" meaning that if your venue has 200 seats you can sell 200 tickets and the patrons find their own seats when they enter the venue. The other way is "assigned seating" where the patron is sold a particular seat in the venue.

When you start "Layout venue seating" to create a seating plan you will be asked to choose an existing venue or press [TAB] to create a new venue. Choosing an existing venue will allow you to update the venue seating (have you have added a row of seats to the venue?) or to create and alternate seating plan for the venue (the balcony is closed) without having to start from scratch.

INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT! If you alter a venue plan that has already been used to sell seats to an event then the seats sold may no longer be valid or it may be possible to sell the same seats again. Instead create a new venue file with a new file name.

GENERAL SEATING
When you begin to set up a venue you will be asked how many seats are in the venue. If you NEVER sell seats by "general seating" you will not have to fill this in. You may divide your venue in up to 9 different sections (main floor, mezzanine, balcony, etc.) and enter the number of seats for each section. That way while the event is "general seating" a patron must sit in the correct section. Of course when you set up an event you may price each section differently.

The next screen will allow you to enter several lines of text that will be printed on all tickets printed when using this seating chart. The lines are…

Venue name
Street address
City, State, Zip
Phone number
Fax number
Email address
Website address

Any lines you do not fill in will not be printed on the tickets.

The next screen will allow you to rename the file you are working on. If you loaded the BIJOU.THR file but want to save the changes you will be making to the seating as the BIJOU2.THR file, this is where you change the filename. If you do not change the file name then any changes made to the seating will be saved to the existing file. NOT A GOOD IDEA!

(More Ticket Sales on next page.)

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