POS basics — first sale, receipts, cash drawer

1. 1Add items. Tap a product tile, search by name, or scan a barcode. A scan is matched against SKU, barcode and OEM/part number.
2. 2Adjust quantities in the cart, or type * followed by a digit to multiply the next item — *5 adds five.
3. 3Attach a customer (optional) to record loyalty points against the sale.
4. 4Take payment. Choose Cash, Credit/Debit Card, Mobile Payment, Cryptocurrency or Gift Card. A sale can be split across more than one method.
5. 5Finish. The receipt is produced, stock is decremented, and change due is shown.

If any part of the payment is cash, AlphaTill opens the drawer automatically when the sale completes — you do not press anything. Drawers are opened through the receipt printer, so the drawer must be connected to the printer’s kick port.

If no drawer is connected the sale still completes normally; the app simply has nothing to open.

A customer who has forgotten their wallet should not block the queue. Hold the transaction, serve the next person, then resume it — the cart, customer and payment method all come back. Held transactions survive closing and reopening the app.

F1 – F8

Add quick-access product 1–8

F9

Open the barcode scanner

F10

Checkout

F11

Hold the current transaction

F12

Clear the cart

Esc

Cancel / close the open dialog

* then a digit

Set the quantity multiplier for the next item

The function keys work even while the cursor is in the search box, so a cashier never has to click away to check out.

Three kinds work without configuration: USB and Bluetooth scanners that behave as keyboards, the camera scanner (F9), and RS-232 serial scanners via the desktop app’s serial bridge. A scan that matches nothing locally is looked up in your catalogue before the app reports it as unknown, and near-matches are suggested rather than silently dropped.

Everything on this page is a service we run. The desktop app is not one of them: sales, receipts, cash drawer and inventory run against the database on your own PC, so an outage here does not stop you selling. An already-activated licence keeps working through a lapse in check-ins.

Card payments taken through an online processor still need the internet — that is the processor’s connection, not ours. Cash sales are unaffected either way. Current service state is on the status page.