If your business supplies guest houses, resorts, cafes or other shops, then your software is a paperwork machine before it is anything else. The selling is a conversation. The money moves because four documents were produced correctly and in the right order.
Refuse software that cannot produce all four. Here is what each one is for, and what goes wrong when it is missing.
The quotation
Your price, in writing, with a date it stops being valid. In a market where costs move with shipping, a quote without an expiry is a promise you did not intend to make, and somebody will hold you to it six weeks later.
It should carry its own number, live in the system rather than in a chat thread, and be able to become an order without being typed again. When a purchasing manager remembers a different price, you both need to be looking at the same document.
The delivery note
What actually went on the boat, signed for at the other end. It is not about money at all, which is why it is the document most often skipped and the one that settles the most arguments.
Every dispute about a short delivery ends at a signature. Without one, it ends at whoever is more insistent.
The tax invoice
The request for payment, carrying the fields a business customer needs in order to account for it: their details, your registration number, a unique number, the taxable value, the rate and the tax. An invoice that does not fit your customer's accounting comes back to you, and you do the work twice. There is a fuller list in the GST questions to ask a supplier.
Put your bank details on it. It sounds trivial. It is the difference between being paid on the day they process invoices and being paid after somebody chases you for account details.
The receipt
Proof of what was paid, including part payments. In a trade where a large invoice is settled in two or three pieces, the receipt is what stops the balance from becoming a matter of opinion.
The two reports that hold the chain together
Documents are only half of it. A supply business also needs a statement per customer, listing what is open, and an aging view showing how old each balance is. Send the statement at thirty days as routine rather than as a complaint, and work the aging list from the oldest column, because that is where money stops being late and starts being lost.
Delivered and never invoiced is the most expensive failure in wholesale, and it is invisible: nobody complains about an invoice that never arrived.
Buying is the other half
The same system should record what you bought and what it cost, so your margin is a fact rather than a memory and the tax you paid is already assembled when it is time to file. A system that handles selling beautifully and ignores purchasing leaves you doing the harder half in a spreadsheet.
What to ask for in a demo
Ask the supplier to run one order end to end in front of you: quote a resort, convert it, print the delivery note, issue the invoice, take a part payment, print the receipt, then show you the customer's balance and their statement. It takes ten minutes. It is the most informative ten minutes in the whole purchase.
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: quotation, delivery note, invoice.
RekordPOS runs that chain, and we would rather show it than describe it. Ask for the ten minutes.