HARDWARE STORE POS

A point-of-sale and back-office system for a hardware store. Pipes, fittings, cement, paint, wire and fasteners are sold across the counter, often by weight or length, and most of the products have no barcode.

The till is built around the people who use it all day: every sale can be completed from the keyboard, each product has a short numeric code, and the counter screens never show a cost price or a delete button.

It runs on a single Windows machine and keeps trading with the internet down. The owner gets a separate, read-only dashboard on their phone, kept up to date in the background.

1. Find the item. Type part of the name or its code. Typing 0036*12 adds twelve in one go.
2. Confirm quantity and discount. Enter moves through quantity, then a percentage discount, then back to search. Quantities like 12.5 kg or 3.2 m are exact.
3. Take payment. F12 opens cash or credit, with quick amounts, the change due and rounding to the nearest rupee.
4. Print the bill. An 80mm thermal receipt is laid out and encoded as ESC/POS. In the demo it appears on screen instead.

Owner mode holds products, purchases, suppliers, customers, expenses and settings. It is unlocked with a PIN and locks itself again after a period of inactivity.

Cost prices and margins are shown as letters from a code word, the way many shops mark costs on a price tag, so that a customer looking at the screen cannot read them. The database still stores exact numbers.

The owner PIN is shared with trusted counter staff so they can add a product. Profit, margin and cost of sales therefore sit behind a second PIN that shares no path with the first, asked for on every visit.