So what exactly is EPOS?
In this article #
- The EPOS
- The HUB
The EPOS #
An ‘Electronic Point of Sale’, more commonly known as a till, processes transactions in a shop (mostly sales).
There is much room for confusion here – ‘an EPOS unit’ is the name we give to a single till, but it has also become the name we give to a stock management system overall; so “EPOS” could be referring to just a single till or to a larger system which has till units within it.
However, whichever way you look at it, the Electronic Point of Sale unit is not the brains of your retail system…
The HUB #
It’s the back office hub that acts as the brain of your retail business. The tills, along with sales channels such as your own website or Amazon/eBay, acts as more of an arm – feeding sales and other information to the system’s hub. The ‘back office hub’ is the brain – it usually is the part that does almost all the calculating, all the integrations, the analysis and all the checking.
Products are created via the back office before they’re recognised by the tills and your website. Then, once a shop or online sale is complete, it will be picked up by the back office again. Those sales now show in sales and stock reports.
You may find other articles in the Learning Centre helpful, such as What are the main differences between EPOS systems?
