Questions shop owners ask about PointLit POS

Partly, and it is worth knowing exactly where the line is. If the internet drops during a shift, the till keeps ringing up sales and taking cash and card payments, holds each sale in a queue on that till, and sends them all by itself when the line comes back. If the till has to restart, it opens the register again with no internet, as long as it has opened your business online since PointLit's last update; a till that has not, such as a new computer, cannot open until the line is back. Choosing a customer, and with it loyalty points and on-account sales, waits for the connection, and so do reports and the management screens.

Nothing is lost and you do not have to stop serving, as long as the till stays open. The register shows that it is offline and how many sales are waiting to be sent. Each sale is saved on the till as you take it, and when the connection returns the till sends them in order and the indicator clears. The one thing to avoid is ringing a sale again because you cannot see it on another till yet: it is waiting in the queue, and ringing it twice is how one sale becomes two.

Starter is the Free plan, for one shop. Counter and Chain are paid monthly, every 3 or 6 months, or yearly, and Enterprise is priced with you. Prices are in Egyptian pounds for shops in Egypt and in US dollars elsewhere, and every plan and price is on the pricing page. New business registration is closed for now; requesting early access costs nothing and commits your shop to nothing. Outside Egypt, Counter costs $29 a month and Chain $79 a month for 3 branches, paid yearly; Starter is the Free plan for one shop.

Staff are handled with roles rather than licences: you create an account for each person and give them a role that decides what they can reach, and PointLit ships five roles to start from that you can copy and edit for your own shop. Branches are what differs between the plans. Starter is for a single branch, and Chain is for running several branches as one business, with prices per branch, stock transfers between them and reports across all of them.

Most likely, yes. Barcode scanners are the easy case: nearly all of them behave like a keyboard, so a scan types the code and PointLit reads it with no driver and no setup. Receipt printers with 58 mm or 80 mm paper and a cash drawer that opens through the printer work through the PointLit Windows app. A weighing scale can be connected to the Windows app and tested from its settings; at the till the cashier enters the weight as the quantity. In a web browser, a receipt prints through the computer's own print dialog to any printer installed on it, while the cash drawer and the scale still need the Windows app. From version 0.8.0, the Windows app prints Arabic receipts as one picture on a receipt printer installed in Windows; a printer connected to a serial port still prints Arabic letters as question marks. Tell us your printer and scale models at support@pointlit.com before you rely on them.

Yes, in the tablet's web browser. Open your shop's web address, sign in and use the till there: the screens are laid out for tablets, held sideways or upright. There are no PointLit apps in the App Store or Google Play yet. On a tablet, receipts print through the browser's print dialog, while a cash drawer and a scale need the PointLit Windows app on a computer.

Yes, completely, and it was not added afterwards. Every screen, the receipt and the Z report are laid out right to left in Arabic, with figures kept in a tabular typeface so columns still line up when the text direction flips. The two languages are held to the same list of phrases by an automated check that fails the build if one falls behind, so an Arabic screen cannot quietly end up with less on it than the English one. On-screen and emailed receipts are fully Arabic. From version 0.8.0, the Windows app prints Arabic receipts as one picture on a receipt printer installed in Windows, and a web browser prints them through the print dialog, which uses the printer's Windows driver. A printer connected to a serial port still cannot draw Arabic letters.

Yes. Your products, sales, stock and customer records belong to your business, and you can take them out at any time: report screens export to CSV and Excel. Your data is kept in PointLit's database on a server PointLit runs, and the database itself keeps each business's data apart from every other business's. A backup of the database and of uploaded files is taken every night and before every update, and kept for 14 days. To ask for a full export, or for your business's data to be deleted, write to support@pointlit.com.

Not from a screen you can click today, because there is no self-service importer in the product yet. If you are moving from another till system, what is practical depends on what your current system will let you export, so write to support@pointlit.com about what you have before you commit to a changeover date rather than after. Products, their variants and opening stock levels are normally worth bringing across; historical transactions usually are not.

Yes. There is no self-service importer yet, so moving a product list from a notebook or a spreadsheet into PointLit is something we work through with you. Write to support@pointlit.com and tell us what you have: roughly how many products, whether they come in sizes and colours, and how many branches you run. We will tell you the quickest way to get your products, prices and opening stock in.

Whenever you want, in a format anything can read. Report screens export to CSV, Excel and PDF, and what you see on screen with the filters you have applied is what comes out in the file, so an export is never a different, slightly disagreeing version of the report you were looking at. It is worth exporting once early on, simply so you have seen for yourself that your data comes out before you have years of it in here.

Everything a person can do is a named permission, and a role is a set of them. PointLit ships five roles to start from, Owner, Manager, Cashier, Warehouse and Kitchen, and each shop gets its own editable copies rather than a fixed set. The defaults follow how a shop actually divides work: a Cashier rings sales and opens and closes their own till, but does not refund, void or discount, because those are the three acts that make money disappear and they are safer needing a second person. Every one of those defaults is yours to change.

Not yet. PointLit does not send receipts to the Egyptian Tax Authority's e-receipt system today. It is planned, and this answer will change when it is ready. Until then, if your shop is required to issue e-receipts, keep the system you issue them with, and write to support@pointlit.com before you switch.

By email, at support@pointlit.com, in Arabic or English. The same address answers questions before you sign up, helps with setting up, and supports shops that already use PointLit.