Trade counter software

Why generic retail EPOS does not fit

Retail point of sale assumes a shopper: no account, one price, one unit, and a receipt as the only paperwork. A trade counter breaks every one of those assumptions. Customers are on account. The price depends on who is asking. Products are sold in lengths, weights, packs and part-packs. And the paperwork — quotes, delivery notes, invoices, credit notes, statements — is most of the job.

That is why merchants who try a general retail till usually end up with a spreadsheet beside it, and then a second spreadsheet, and eventually a system nobody can leave.

Configurable, not generic

There is a difference between software that is generic — the same for everyone, fitting nobody well — and software that is configurable, where the shape of your products and pricing is set up during onboarding.

In PlanIt EPOS you define your own categories, your own units of measure and your own product attributes. That means length and grade for timber, size and finish for ironmongery, size and colour for workwear, tin size and base for paint. They are real fields you can search, price and report on — not notes typed into a description.

Starter configurations

Setup does not start from a blank screen. Each trade begins from a starter configuration with sensible categories, units and attributes for that kind of business, which is then adjusted to your actual catalogue. It is faster than building from nothing and less constraining than a fixed vertical.

Which businesses this covers

• Decorating centres — paint by tin size and base, colour matching, trade accounts for local decorators
• Timber merchants — stock in lengths and grades, cut-to-size sales, delivery scheduling
• Ironmongers and hardware stores — very wide catalogues, loose and packed quantities, barcode-driven counters
• Agricultural merchants — seasonal demand, bulk pricing, farm accounts on extended terms
• Fixings suppliers — boxes, part boxes and quantity breaks
• Workwear suppliers — size and colour variants, embroidery and special orders
• Tool suppliers — serialised and warrantied items, repairs and hire adjacency

The common thread is trade customers, negotiated pricing and real stock. If that describes your business, the model fits even if your products do not appear on any of our industry pages.

The counter itself

A trade counter is judged on the queue. PlanIt EPOS is built around scanning and searching rather than function keys and memorised codes: scan anywhere on the sales screen, search by code, description or supplier reference, and add by tapping a tile for the lines that never get scanned.

• Cash, card, account and split tenders
• Line and order-level discounts with the margin effect shown
• A price override at the till for the times you need one, recorded against the user
• Held sales, so a customer who has forgotten something does not block the queue
• Returns and refunds against the original receipt, with a reason and a disposition
• Cash management with float, cash in and out, and an end-of-day reconciliation

Accounts, quotes and paperwork

Trade customers get an account with terms, a credit limit checked at the till, aged balances and statements. Retail customers can be served as cash sales without an account, on the same till, with a receipt rather than an invoice.

Quotations are priced at the customer’s own terms and convert to orders without retyping. Delivery notes, invoices, credit notes and statements are produced from the same records, so the paperwork agrees with itself.

Stock, buying and reporting

Stock is held per location with every movement recorded as a ledger entry, so a wrong number can be traced rather than corrected and forgotten. Minimum levels raise alerts before you run out, and adjustments carry reasons.

Purchase orders are raised from real demand and received in against the order, including partial deliveries. Supplier price files import from PDF, Excel or CSV with a review step before costs and margins move.

Reporting covers sales, profit and margin by product, category and customer, top customers, best sellers, VAT, staff performance and supplier spend — available on screen rather than as an export you have to build.

Getting set up

The typical path is a demo run on your own products, then a setup that starts from the closest starter configuration and is adjusted to your catalogue. Products and customers import from CSV or Excel; supplier price files establish costs.

PlanIt EPOS is a monthly subscription based on tills, branches and users, with no long-term contract and onboarding included. Counter staff are usually serving confidently within a morning, largely because there is very little to memorise.