A point of sale demo is a good way to judge a screen and a poor way to judge a purchase. Two systems can look almost identical for the twenty minutes somebody is showing them to you, and be completely different things to own. The difference is not in the software. It is in who stands behind it.
Here is what a Maldivian business should establish about a supplier before the shop starts depending on their product.
Do they build it, or do they resell it?
A large share of the systems sold here are foreign products with a local reseller in front of them. That is a perfectly respectable business and it has one consequence you must know about in advance: a reseller cannot change the software. They can install it, train you and pass a message upstream. When you need a field added to an invoice, or a rate changed because the law changed, the person you are speaking to is a messenger.
Ask the question plainly. Who wrote this, and who can change it? A builder will answer immediately, because they are proud of it.
What happens when the tax rules change
Rules move. When they do, every business using a system waits on the same queue. With a local builder, that is a release. With a reseller, it is a support ticket into a company that has thousands of customers in other countries and no particular reason to prioritise a rule that applies only here.
Ask when the product last changed because of something specific to the Maldives. The answer tells you how close the maker is to your market.
Where does the data live, and who can reach it?
Every cloud system holds your sales, your customers and your costs on somebody's server. Ask where, ask who has access, and ask what you get if you ask for a copy. A supplier who cannot answer the third question has probably never been asked it, which is itself an answer.
We wrote separately about the practical side of that in whose numbers are they.
Who answers on a Friday evening?
A till that will not print on a busy Friday is not a software problem, it is a closed shop. Support sold from another time zone answers on Monday morning their time, which can be two days later here. Establish the hours, the channel and the person, and test them once before you are relying on them.
This is worth more than most feature comparisons. A slightly plainer product with somebody reachable in Malé beats a richer one answered from a queue in another hemisphere.
How long has the thing been running?
Software that has run through two or three years of real trading has already survived the parts that a demo cannot test: a day when the connection went, a staff member who found an unusual way to use a screen, a month end that did not add up, a customer who pressed the wrong button eleven times. Ask how long the product has been in production and how many businesses run it now.
New is not disqualifying. Unproven and unaccountable together is. The same measure applies to any software supplier, and we set it out in full in rating point of sale software for a Maldivian business.
What does leaving look like?
Ask this on the first day, when it is a neutral question. Can you take your product list, your customers, your sales history and your stock with you, in a format another system could read? If a supplier finds the question uncomfortable, that discomfort is the product of a decision they have already made about you.
Where we stand
We build RekordPOS ourselves, in Malé, and we run it for businesses here. That means the answers above are short in our case: we wrote it, we change it, we answer the phone, and every screen has an export. It also means we carry the consequences of getting it wrong, which is the point of asking a supplier these questions at all.
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: how to choose a POS system in the Maldives.
If you are weighing up two systems and want a second opinion on what you are being offered, send us the quotes. We will tell you what we would ask, even where the answer does not favour us.