POS Systems – Covenience at Hand
Point of sale or POS systems are the terminals that manage the selling process in retail outlets, ticketing outlets, etc. POS terminals could be manned or unmanned depending on the requirement. It is the location where a transaction occurs and is the equivalent of an electronic cash register. The POS systems allow the creation and printing of the receipts. In the early days of development of the system, the electronic cash registers were controlled with proprietary software. Their functions and communication capabilities were limited. The fast-paced developments in the communication sector in the 1990s greatly improved the local processing power, local data storage and networking. Further, the graphical user interface has made the development of highly functional and flexible POS systems possible. As all the components for the development of such systems are available off-the-shelf these days, the costs have come down to a great extent. Web-based POS systems started operating in the 2000s. The retail industry predominantly uses POS terminals.