Your till is the phone in your pocket

A trader selling one thing can be paid with one number. A pharmacy cannot. A hardware shop cannot. A restaurant certainly cannot. The moment a sale is made of parts, you need a till — and a till has always meant hardware.

What the hardware was actually for

Strip away the plastic and a till does three jobs: it adds up the parts, it gets the tax right, and it produces a receipt both sides accept.

None of those three require a machine. They require software and a screen. The shopkeeper is already holding a screen.

Built from the lines, not typed

The sale is assembled from items with quantities. VAT is applied per line, at the rate set for the business, so a basket mixing taxed and untaxed goods comes out right rather than roughly right.

The total is then computed from the lines. Nobody types it. This sounds small until you count how many disputes in a small shop come down to a total that was typed wrong and noticed too late.

Then the phone shows a one-time code with the amount already in it. The customer scans and pays. There is no number to read out, no amount to mistype, and no argument about what was owed.

The receipt is the record

What the customer sees on the receipt — the lines, the quantities, the tax, the reference — is what is held against the sale in your records. Print it or show it on screen. It is the same record either way.

Staff without handing over the business

This is where most small shops get stuck: the owner cannot be at the counter all day, but giving an employee the phone usually means giving them everything.

Staff get their own logins with a cashier role. A cashier takes payments and can refund up to a limit the business sets. A cashier cannot change where settlement money goes, cannot read API secrets, and cannot export the customer list. The owner sets the refund limit; the software enforces it, every time, without a conversation.

What it costs

No hardware, no licence, no monthly rental. You pay the ordinary merchant rate on what you sell, shown in your dashboard.

The till you have been saving for is the phone in your pocket.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• Line items carry quantity and a VAT rate per line, so the tax on a mixed basket is right rather than approximated.
• The total is computed from the lines, so a mistyped total is not possible.
• The receipt and the checkout detail show the same lines the customer agreed to.
• Staff can be given their own logins with a cashier role whose refund limit is set per organisation.

What it costs

No hardware and no licence. The sale carries the ordinary merchant rate shown in the dashboard.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Point of sale on the features page.

Read next

• BitriQR payments — One code on the wall. Every payer it can reach.
• Hosted checkout — A page that only offers what will work.
• Team and roles — Delegate the counter, not the business.