Overview
What a shop manager fears on a Friday evening is not the queue. It is the moment the queue stops moving — the connection drops, the register waits on a server somewhere, and the line backs up to the door while the cashier apologises.
Nama POS is built around that moment. The rest of Nama ERP runs in a browser; the register does not. It is a desktop application installed on the till, with its own local database of items, prices, customers and settings. Sales, returns, payments, shifts and stock counts are written locally first and sync to the central system in the background. The line can go down. The register keeps selling.
Unsent, then sent
Every document a register creates lives one of two lives. Unsent means it is saved on the till, printed, and in the customer’s hand. Sent means it has reached the central ERP, where it posts to accounting, moves stock and appears in company-wide figures. When the register is online the gap between the two is moments; when it is offline, documents queue and the cashier notices nothing.
Sync is invisible until a document will not go up, so the register counts each failure and stops retrying after 25 attempts — one bad record cannot jam the queue behind it. The reasons are the ordinary three: the server is unreachable, a business rule on the server rejected the document, or the credentials were not accepted. Each is recorded against the document rather than lost. An outage costs you a slow evening, never a shift’s sales.
At the counter
Everything on the selling screen is shaped by how fast it has to be. An invoice can be held while another customer is served and picked up again. An item that comes with choices — sizes, milk and sugar, extras — opens its add-on groups as it is added, so the receipt and the kitchen ticket say what the customer actually asked for. Prices and expiry can be checked without disturbing the sale in progress.
When a cashier reaches the edge of what they are allowed to do — a discount past their ceiling, a return outside the window, a price change — a supervisor authorises it on the spot, in a dialog, without the cashier logging out and back in. Where a fingerprint reader is fitted, that authorisation is a finger on the scanner, and so is the shift handover between two cashiers on the same till.
Payment is a single screen with a running remaining figure: cash with change, card through an integrated terminal that returns the approval and the masked card number, several methods split across one bill, deferred to a customer’s account where the cashier is permitted to, store credit notes, discount coupons, and loyalty points redeemed against the total — with a one-time password where the programme requires one.
Promotions stay honest. On a buy-one-get-one offer the free item can be claimed when the customer’s own bottle is scanned, or reconciled at payment, instead of appearing on the receipt for something still sitting on the shelf.
Restaurants and cafés
Seating is organised into halls and tables, each table coloured by whether it is free, busy or reserved, with the running bill attached to it as rounds are ordered. Reservations hold a table with a deposit against the final bill, and record the reason and any fee if the booking falls through. Waiters take orders on Captain Order, a phone and tablet app that sends them to the kitchen and the register instead of walking them there.
The shift, the drawer and the branch’s stock
A shift opens on a counted opening balance, entered per payment method and currency, and closes on a count against what the register expects to find — including the pay-ins that topped up the drawer mid-shift and the pay-outs dropped to the safe. Discrepancies are a figure on the close, not an argument the next morning.
The till is also the branch’s stock front line: goods received from head office or a supplier, transfers to another branch, counts and write-offs are all raised at the register and sync up like every other document.
Tax at the till
In Saudi Arabia the simplified tax invoices a register issues carry their QR code from the moment they are printed and are reported to ZATCA. In Egypt the till runs the electronic receipt track rather than the invoice track, with each device registered with the Tax Authority under its own vendor, model and serial before it can transmit.
Everything above — the tender screen, tables, shifts, add-ons, the sync queue and the recovery steps when a document sticks — is documented screen by screen in the Nama POS guide, including the data sync chapter that explains what “unsent” means and how to clear it.
