Pearl EPOS is an additional module that makes it easy to take sales at a till using MAC or PC and a barcode scanner.

Setting up Departments

Every separate till you use should be set up as a Pearl department. This will allow you to reconcile sales and cash at the end of the day for each cash drawer, and to show reports for each till point separately.

Go to Setup - Other - Departments from the main menu, and add/edit your departments here. If you take credit card payments online using a service such as SECPay or Protx it’s a good idea to run your website as a separate department. If on the other hand you are processing your online sales using one of the PDQ card machines in your store then you may want to incorporate the website sales into one of your tills for the end of day reconciliation.

Choose the receipt printer that you’re using for each department so that receipts are formatted properly. You can also add text to the bottom of receipts printed for marketing purposes. Do this in the edit departments screen.

Setting up your hardware (printer etc)

If you have purchased a Star TSP100 series USB receipt printer and cash drawer, you will need to install the printer driver supplied with the printer. The Star TSP100 series includes a driver CD; install the software from this CD before plugging in the printer. The driver can also be downloaded from the Star Micronics website

Once the printer driver is installed, connect the receipt printer to your computer’s USB port and the cash drawer automatic kick-open cable to the socket in the back of the printer. The earth wire from the cash drawer should be attached to the screw in the rear of the printer.

Set the printer for the department as shown above, and remove the header/footer information from your browser print setup as follows:

Internet Explorer

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Click File - Page Setup
3. Delete all the text shown in the header and footer fields

Firefox

1. Open Firefox
2. Click File - Page Setup
3. Click to the Margins & Header/footer tab
4. Set your top margin to 8mm, right and left margins to 2mm, bottom margin to 20mm
5. Set all header and footer information to —blank— 

This will ensure that only relevant information is printed on your receipts.

Cash drawer opening
The cash drawer is set to kick open automatically after the receipt is printed; this is controlled by the Star printer driver and will not happen with incompatible cash drawers, or with a non Star printer driver.

Open your printer properties (in windows go to Start - Printers and Faxes, then select the receipt printer) and set the options as shown in the screen shot on the left.

If you are using an Epson TMT88 receipt printer then please contact us for more information on setting up your receipt printing.

Setting up staff

Pearl will allow you to set up a login account for each of your staff members. This means that you can restrict access to certain areas for certain staff, track back sales to the person that created them, run internal commission schemes and track hours worked.

To create a new staff member, click Contacts - Create new from the main menu and enter their details. Tick the admin box. Once the contact has been created, click Setup - Staff to edit the access levels for your staff members.

By default, all new staff members are given access to all areas of Pearl.

Sales

There is a retail-specific module for creating sales quickly at the till point. Once logged in to Pearl, click Home - Open EPOS Console. Select the department that you are using (this will be remembered for the next sale).

To create a new sale:

1. Ask if the customer has bought from you before [since you started Pearl]. If they have, then they should be on the system, so search for them using their first name or last name. A list of results will be displayed. If they are on the list, click their name to proceed.
2. If they have not bought before or are not in the search results, enter their details on the right hand side of the screen. This is so that you can send marketing information later, and so that they can log in to the website and buy items using a loyalty discount if you have one set up. For this reason an email address is really important.
3. If the customer doesn’t want to give you their details then you can click the Use default customer link to allocate the sale to an anonymous customer (see section below).
4. Once the details are shown on the right of the screen, you should choose the name of the staff member that is creating the sale, and click confirm customer/staff.
5. Now add the products to the sale. If you are using a barcode scanner then make sure the cursor is in the barcode box and scan the item’s barcode. If you don’t have a scanner, and the item has a Pearl barcode, you can type the numeric code by hand into the barcode box then hit Enter on your keyboard (see section below).
6. Alternatively, you can click search for products – and then find the item by browsing the categories or by typing a part of the name into the search box. Once the item is displayed, click the name and it will be added to the sale.
7. Edit the quantity, price or discount if required and click the update (tick) icon
8. If you add the wrong product or scan the same product twice, you can remove the incorrect entry by changing the quantity of that item to zero and press enter or click the update icon.
9. Once all items are added to the sale, choose a payment method
10. If the customer is paying by cash, type the amount of cash they have given you into the box
11. Click confirm sale. You will be taken to the confirmation screen and a receipt window will be opened. Print this receipt on your till printer. If cash was chosen as the payment method the amount of change due will be shown.
12. If you have an automatic cash drawer connected to your receipt printer it will be opened at this point.
13. You are now ready to take the next sale.

The process will become second nature after a few transactions. If you cannot find the item you are looking for and you are sure that it does not exist on the system, then you can create it quickly using the EPOS screen, or you can use the misc item. To add a misc item to the sale, type 1000 (or 1001 for non VAT misc) in the barcode box and hit Enter.

Setting up a default customer

A new customer may not want to give you their details when you are creating a sale. For this reason, a default customer must be created. Create a default customer the same way you would create any contact in the admin system, Contacts - Create new. Input a customer name and surname; something along the lines of misc and sales, or anon and customer and save the contact (don’t worry about putting this contact into a group). You must make a note of the ID number of this contact. To find this number, hover over the contacts menu link in the CRM screen. Their ID will be displayed in brackets after their name. Next, go to Setup > Other > EPOS and input the ID of the default customer that you just created into the default till user box and tick the other boxes as required.

Search tips

When searching for products anywhere in Pearl, search for only part of the name to give the greatest chance of showing a result. Searching for something too broadly, hood for example, will display many options, so aim to strike a balance. Generally single word searches are best. Pearl will search in the name only; if a colour or size is specified as an option it will not be searched for. Also be aware that the item may have been misspelled.

Receipts

To edit the footer on your receipts go to Setup - Other - Department and choose a department. Enter the text into the receipt footer box. The text at the top of the receipt will be printed automatically from your company information stored in Pearl

Deposits

To take a deposit, create a sale using the misc item without VAT code. You can change the name of this item to Deposit for xxx and change the price to the deposit amount paid. To allocate this deposit to a later sale, add the same misc item with the same deposit price, but make the quantity negative. When the item the deposit was taken for is added to the sale, the price will be reduced by the deposit amount, as shown below.

Refunds

Creating a refund is exactly the same as creating a sale except for the need to edit quantity to less than zero. So for example a customer returns with an item wanting a complete refund, enter the item as for a sale then edit the quantity to -1. This will show a negative value total for the sale, which is the amount that you should give the customer from the till or refund back to their card. You can mix items on the sale if they want an exchange for another item; the total cost difference will be calculated for you.

Discounts

You can apply a standard rate discount to a sale using the drop-down options listed by the product in the EPOS screen. This will reload the page with the discount applied to the regular price. You can also type a new price directly into the price box and click update (or press Enter). Note that if a drop-down discount is chosen this will override any total entered into the price box.

Barcodes

Pearl can create a barcode for every item on a Purchase Order to make your sale process faster. Once you have received a delivery for a Purchase Order using the steps shown above, click the barcode icon whilst in the PO or while on the Purchase Order manager screen.

Barcodes will be displayed for printing on a 65-label A4 Avery-style sheet on a regular printer, requiring no special barcode printer to be installed. The quality of the printer should be high enough to give a crisp line. It’s a good idea to print the barcodes even if you don’t have a barcode scanner since the barcode will show the item's price, it’s name and the item code for typing into the EPOS screen.

Stock control

Stock quantities are increased when a Purchase Order is received, and decreased when sales are posted to accounts (reconciled) at the end of the day. If you find that stock quantities have become inaccurate you can edit them by doing a stock take using the Products - Setup - Import/Export screen.

Items added to sales using the EPOS screen will be allocated (reserved) until the sale has been reconciled. Depending on the particular settings for the item, the item will be shown as not available on your website. To allow customers to buy out of stock (or reserved) items online, set the allow checkout field to yes for the product.

Running a stock take

You should physically count the amount of stock you have on a regular basis, ideally just before each month end. This will then be synchronised with Pearl. You can run a stock take in sections- per brand or per category.

1. Click Products - Setup - Import/Export from the main menu
2. Choose brand(s) or category(s) to export
3. Tick the box to include your current stock quantity. This will also ensure that the exported file will only contain items where stock is relevant (it will exclude bundles and items where manage stock is set to no)
4. Click Export file
5. Save the file to your computer
6. Open Excel
7. Click File - Open… and browse to the file you just downloaded. Note that to see the file you will need to select All files (*.*) from the box titled Files of type: hint: Firefox will usually place the file on your desktop
8. Open the file. A wizard box will open. Click Next then Finish
9. You now have a copy of the products as stored on your Pearl system. You can edit what you need in this file – for example the stock quantities - and then save as Text (tab de-limited)
10. In the Products Import/Export screen in Pearl, browse for the file, tick the box stock values in spreadsheet have been confirmed with stock take and click Upload file.
11. The quantities of items will be updated.

Note that you can also use this export/import method to update other columns. You can create new products in the same way by entering add in the first column instead of the product ID.

End of day

It is important to reconcile your sales for each department at the end of each day. Until sales have been reconciled they will not appear in your accounting information; the reconciling step allows you to check for any errors before updating your accounts.

Reconciling sales will:

• Reduce the stock levels on the system, until reconciliation this has only been allocated.
• Automatically create accounting entries, increasing bank account values for sales, decreasing for refunds.
• Lock the sale so that it cannot be edited. (Shipping addresses can still be updated)

At the end of the day once all sales have been made, click Sales - Reconcile dept. Choose a department to display the total value of the sales completed since the last reconcile date. Note that only closed sales will be included in a reconciliation – these are sales that are on status Closed:other or Closed:shipped. Quotes and half processed sales will not be reconciled.

The list of sales will show a value for each payment method.

1. Check the report from your PDQ machine against the total shown for card (PDQ). If there is a difference here, you can see the sales that make up this total by clicking view. Make any corrections now.
2. Remove any cash from the till that you are taking to the bank or putting in a safe. Enter this value into the cash removed box.
3. Count the remaining cash float by entering the quantity of each denomination in the left hand side of the reconciliation screen.
4. The total cash remaining in the till plus the cash removed should equal the cash sales taken since the last reconcile for this department. If not, recheck, make an adjusting sale or add/remove cash to make it balance.
5. Once everything matches you will be able to click reconcile department

In the example below you can see that £10.00 has been taken in cash, the cash in the till at the start of the day was £295.00, £250.00 has been removed leaving £55.00 in the till. The £55.00 remaining in the till is made up from 20x50p coins, 5x£1 coins, 10x£2 coins and 4x£5 notes (the numbers in the green box on the left)