Adding up a basket is the easy part. Any till app on any phone can do it, and a lot of what gets sold as a point of sale system in this region is exactly that with a receipt printer attached. The difference shows up three months later, in whether anybody can tell you what is on the shelf.
Six questions that a real inventory system answers and a till app does not.
1. Does a quantity belong to a place?
The moment you have a shop and a store room, or a shop and a second shop, quantity has to mean quantity somewhere. Ask whether stock is held per location, whether a sale takes it from the right one, and whether moving goods between them leaves a record. Systems that hold one global number look fine on day one and cannot be reconciled by month three.
2. Can the same product have arrived at different costs?
It always has. Prices move with shipping, and the box you sell today was bought at a different price from the box behind it. If the system holds one cost per product, then every margin it reports is an approximation, and the direction of the error changes with the market.
Batches also carry expiry, which matters more than cost if you sell anything dated.
3. What does it do before something runs out?
A report of what has already run out is a record of sales you did not make. Ask for an alert level per product and a screen that lists what is approaching it. In a country where restocking depends on a boat, the alert level is not a nicety, it is the ordering system.
4. Can staff correct a count, and does it leave a trace?
Real shops find discrepancies. The question is not whether the system prevents them, it is whether a correction is recorded as a correction: who, when, how much, and against which product. A system where somebody can quietly type a new number is not an inventory system, it is a whiteboard with a password.
5. What is my stock worth?
Ask for the total value of stock at cost, on one screen, today. It is the money you have parked on shelves and it is usually larger than the owner expects. Watch what it does over a few months against your sales: rising stock and flat sales is the clearest early warning of a cash problem that a small business gets.
Any system can tell you what you sold. Fewer can tell you what you are holding, and that is the number that runs out of cash.
6. How do things get into the catalogue?
A shop with six hundred products will not be typed in one at a time. Ask about bulk upload from a spreadsheet, about editing many products at once, and about printing labels for the lines that arrive without a barcode. This is the difference between starting properly and starting with a hundred products and good intentions.
The comparison in one line
A till app tells you what happened at the counter. An inventory system tells you what you own, what it cost, where it is, and what is about to run out. The second one is what stops a shop from selling stock it does not have and buying stock it did not need.
The same subject from the other side of the counter, written for the person using the till rather than choosing it, is on the product's own blog: stock control for a small shop.
If you want to see those six answers on real screens rather than in a brochure, RekordPOS has all six and we are happy to walk through them with your own catalogue. Ask for a look.