From Cash Register to Point of Sales - Computers

When the electronic revolution started to move forward, little did we know that almost everything we use will be 'electronified', so to speak. Take the lowly cash register, for example. Up until the 1980's and a bit into the 1990's, all cash registers were still electronic, and for all intents and purposes, manually inventoried.

After all computers experienced an explosion of power, nearly all cash registers made after this time are now all but computers by themselves and more importantly, there is that one feature that distinguishes these new generation of cash registers from the old, they are now connected to a form database system that keeps a record of everything they do.

This effectively transformed cash registers from just keeping track of sales to monitoring just about everything that passes through them, in fact, becoming an active part of the inventory control system of any supermarket, grocery or minimart.

Since changing their roles from just keeping track of the sales to keeping track of inventory levels, this new generation of cash registers have changed their names to POS or what is termed as Point Of Sales machines.

POS machines are generally referred to as cash registers that also have other functions besides just making a grand total of the customer's purchases. They can also keep track of all the inventory, automatically get the sales of the store at that particular moment or know which products are being sold faster and even the profit margin of each product sold.

With the invention of faster and more powerful computers, the ability of the computer to automate a lot of processes rapidly has led to smaller and smaller computers, which fitted perfectly to the size requirements of the POS machines. Not only are the POS machines able to automate calculations that can render a human insane within 30 seconds, the ability to connect directly with the various financing institutions has led to easy purchases via the credit card using these POS machines.

This distinguishing feature of the POS machines was the result of the drive to make records easier to access and faster to update, hence the need for an electronic database that serves to keep track of all the things that a supermarket needs to keep track of.

The same thing is what differentiates the POS from cash register in that it can also access the credit card of the person making the purchase via a secured line to its finance company and on the spot, charge the card for the purchase it made.

This allows the company to serve more people with fewer front line employees and it allows the managers to know what is going on within the company in an in-depth manner and make changes faster so that profits are maintained and this is something that you could not have done ten years ago with the equipments back then.

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