Honest about limits
We will tell you what is not built yet rather than let you discover it after you have moved.
What that actually means
Most merchant software was designed a long time ago, for a back-office server and a counter PC that never moved. It works — in the sense that a business can be run on it — but it asks a lot of the people using it. Screens built around function keys. Reports that have to be exported before they mean anything. A price list that arrives as a PDF and gets retyped, line by line, by whoever drew the short straw.
We had been living with exactly that. So the specification for PlanIt EPOS was not a feature matrix from a competitor’s website. It was a list of the things that went wrong on a counter, and what it would take for them to stop going wrong.
Three examples
The credit-limit check. Goods went out to an account that was already over its limit, because the person serving had no way to see it without leaving the till. So in PlanIt EPOS the limit is checked as the sale is rung through, the shortfall is shown on screen, and an override is a deliberate act by someone with permission — recorded against the sale, not a conversation nobody wrote down.
The offline till. A broadband fault meant a morning of writing sales on a pad and typing them in later, with the inevitable mistakes. So PlanIt EPOS holds products, prices and customers on the device and keeps trading with no connection at all, then synchronises in order when the line returns — each sale carrying its own identifier so it can never post twice.
The price-list reader. Updating costs from supplier PDFs was a job that ate weekends and still introduced errors. So PlanIt EPOS reads the PDF, extracts the products, matches them against the catalogue and puts every row in front of a person with a confidence score before anything is applied.
None of those are clever ideas someone had in a workshop. They are all scar tissue.
How we decide what to build
The test for a new feature is simple: does it solve something that actually happens on a counter? If a merchant cannot describe the Tuesday morning where it would have helped, it does not get built. That is why there is no module in PlanIt EPOS that exists to look impressive in a comparison table.
It also means we will tell you plainly what the software does not do yet. A demo where everything is a yes is not a demo, it is a sales pitch — and you will find out the truth in month two anyway.
What we will not claim
We are a young product and we are not going to pretend otherwise with invented customer counts or unverifiable statistics. What we will do is show you the working software, run on your own products and pricing, and let you judge it on that.