A till has to stand somewhere. Before anything can be sold, the shop it stands in has to be set up for the counter — and a shop here means a branch, which is the same branch the rest of the product already uses for numbering, for who works where and for which place a document belongs to.
Setting one up asks two questions that matter and a dozen that are preferences.
The two that matter
| Setting | Why it cannot be skipped |
|---|---|
| Which branch | The shop. It decides which number series a sale takes, which staff may stand at its tills, and which place the invoice belongs to. One branch can be set up for the counter once. |
| Which warehouse | Where the goods come off. A sale that moves no stock is worse than a sale that does not happen, so a counter refuses to guess. Point a shop at the warehouse whose shelves the customer is actually taking things from. |
A shop with no warehouse still sells — it simply moves no stock. That is right for a business selling only services across the counter, and wrong for everybody else. If you sell goods, set the warehouse.
The rest, in one table
| Setting | What it does | Sensible default |
|---|---|---|
| Takes cash | Whether this shop has a drawer at all. A shop that takes no cash never asks anybody to count one. | On |
| Sells on credit | Whether a sale may be put on a customer’s account instead of paid for. Off unless you actually run khata. | Off |
| Cashier discount ceiling | The largest discount somebody at the till may give without a manager. Left empty, there is no ceiling. | 5–10% |
| Rounding | Whether the total is rounded to the nearest rupee, with the difference posted as round-off. | Nearest rupee |
| Receipt or invoice | What the customer is handed by default. Either way a GST invoice exists behind it and can be printed. | Receipt |
| Receipt heading and footer | The lines printed above and below — shop name, address, and whatever you want at the bottom. | Your shop’s name and address |
| Receipt width | The paper, in millimetres. 80mm is the common thermal roll; 58mm is the small one. | 80mm |
| Email receipts | Not built yet. The setting saves; no receipt is sent. | Off |
| UPI address | Your VPA. With one set, the till can put a QR code on the screen for the customer to scan. | Set it |
| Negative stock | Whether a sale may take the count below zero. Not yet connected — the counter refuses a sale at zero whatever this is set to. Being fixed. | On |
A discount ceiling is the one worth thinking about
Everything else on that list is a preference. The ceiling is a control.
A discount taken quietly at a till is the leak nobody notices for a year, because each one is small and none of them is theft in any way that shows up in a report. Setting a ceiling means a cashier can still be kind to a regular — and anything beyond it needs a manager to stand there and approve it, which is recorded.
The ceiling is read as a percentage of the basket, even when the cashier typed a rupee figure. Knocking ₹200 off a ₹400 sale is a 50% discount and will be stopped by a 10% ceiling; knocking ₹200 off a ₹4,000 sale is 5% and will not.
More than one shop
Set each one up separately, because they genuinely differ: two shops may draw from different warehouses, print different addresses on their receipts, and trust their staff with different discount ceilings.
What they share is the catalogue. Prices, items and tax rates are the business’s, not the shop’s — and where one shop needs its own prices, that is a price list attached to the branch rather than a different item.
What is on the counter can differ per shop without duplicating anything: see the menu.
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us. A question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.