Blog for Floreant POS - Open Source Touch Point of Sale Application for Restaurants

FP going to support MySQL

2010-04-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

We have eventually decided to add MySQL support in next releases. MySQL is most popular database for web system and it should encourage web developers to develop web POS.

Porting or adding option for different database systems is easier job in Floreant POS as we used hibernate based abstraction layer( DAL ).The developers who cannot wait to see should go through this hibernate tutorial . You may also try with any other datatabase system as long as it has Java driver available.

Connecting PHP 5.3 and Apache Derby / JavaDB / IBM Cloudscape

2010-04-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

PHP Developers can connect Derby database of Floreant POS with following steps. It has been tested in PHP 5.3 and should be working in PHP 5.2

Necessary Steps

PHP has different APIs for different databases and PHP can connect to Apache Derby (formerly known as Cloudscape) with DB2 connectivity. For successful connection we need to go with the following steps. Examples are from Ubuntu 9.10 but it should be working other linux distributions with respective commands.

Install DB2 Express C

Download it from here . Extract and run ./db2setup

Download & Compile PHP Source code

Download PHP 5.3 or the latest version. If you are using Ubuntu write
wget http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.3.1.tar.bz2/from/us.php.net/mirror
Untar source code in /usr/src
tar -xjf php-5.x.x.tar.bz2
Build make file with with desired parameters
./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/bin/apxs2 --with-config-file-path=/etc/php5/apache2/ --with-mysql --enable-inline-optimization --disable-debug --enable-bcmath --enable-calendar --enable-ctype --enable-dbase --enable-discard-path --enable-exif --enable-force-cgi-redirect --enable-ftp --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-ttf --enable-shmop --enable-sigchild --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-wddx --with-zlib=yes --with-openssl --with-xsl --with-gd --with-gettext --with-mcrypt --with-mhash --enable-sockets --enable-mbstring=all --enable-mbregex --enable-zend-multibyte --enable-exif --enable-soap --enable-pcntl --with-mysqli --with-mime-magic --with-iconv --with-pdo-mysql --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/freetype2/freetype --enable-cli -disable-cgi --with-pdo-ibm=/home/db2inst1/sqllib/

NOTE: If you find dependent files are missing install them. Following examples are for Ubuntu 9.10 . Other distributions should have similar commands.

#apxs2 was not installed so updated with
sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev

#libxm2-dev not found so installed
apt-get install libxml2-dev

#freetype now installed found solution: http://theserverpages.com/php/manual/en/function.imagefttext.php
apt-get install libfreetype6-dev

#libmcrypt not found. so installed
sudo apt-get install libmcrypt-dev
Compiled PHP
sudo make

#Error while doing make install
# apxs:Error: Activation failed for custom /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file..
# apxs:Error: At least one `LoadModule' directive already has to exist..

Noted that: Its a bug in PHP 5.3
Added this to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and the module built correctly.
# Placeholder for future module installations or else modules will fail to build
#LoadModule dummy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_dummy.so
Stopped any apache2
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
Make install
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
Write a simple php file index.php with

and save as /var/www/index.php
Now browser should show php info page. If everything is ok, it should show pdo_ibm and ibm_db2 enabled.

DB2 CATALOG Configuration

Login DB2 primary account (default is db2insta1).
go to /home/db2insta1/sqllib/bin
and run ./db2
Register Derby Database server as Node
db2 catalog tcpip node floreantpos remote 192.168.16.105 server 1527
Register Database in that Node.
catalog db "posdb" at node posdb authentication server

NOTE: database name shoud be same as Floreant POS Derby Database. While doing these steps you must run Derby Database.
DB2 in Linux does not find Database in smaller case. In case of default database (posdb) we
just created softlink of database folder and found it working smoothly.

ln -s posdb POSDB
Connect database to test
connect posdb with user name "app" and using sa

For more visit the following link:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0409cline2/readme_win.txt

Test with PHP

In /var/www/ write a php file to check if it can connect

$database = 'posdb';
$user = 'app';     //derby pass
$password = 'sa'; //your pass
$hostname = '192.168.16.2'; //your IP here
$port = 1527;

$conn_string = $database;

$conn = db2_connect($conn_string, $user, $password);

if ($conn) {
    echo "Connection succeeded.";
    db2_close($conn);
}
else {
    echo "Connection failed.";
}

?>

Coke vs Orange Juice Companies

2010-04-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

Src: Food service forum

Why promote Open Source? Do you programmers not want to be paid for your work? What do you only want part-time editors making changes as their hobby? It just doesn't make sense to me. Please explain if I've got it wrong, but that won't change my opinion.

Robert Lehman
www.ViewGistics.com

Dear Robert,

Open source is an established business model. Instead of selling software license, open source model sells service (support, customization, modification of reports etc). There are many successful projects who left their source open and still making enough money to sustain.

Traditional software business rely on hiding source code and they may get surprised how a software company can survive giving away their hard work.

Let me give answer your question with a layman's example. Think

-Source code is like Recipe for Cooking.
-Compiling can be compared to Cooking and
-Binary Executable are final cooked food.

Now Closed source (Traditional) companies are those restaurants who hide their recipe. They hide recipe because no other can produce same taste, so they would make more profit and lock their guests. This model works when cooks get sure their recipes are unique.

But we know there are already lots of Recipe books in the market and one can cook delicious foods without special recipe. Most of the restaurants in the world in fact runs with common recipes and people eats there even though they could cook same thing at home.

Interestingly all those generic recipe restaurants make business. How can they survive? Reason is market is so big that one player cannot capture the whole. Guests can find food in his area and whoever gives better service makes better profit.

I told before that Close source works best when you have a special formula that nobody could repeat (like Coca cola). In software highly researched mathematical program could be similar candidate, But Restaurant business, Accounting or ERP has almost similar business process for many years. Literally there are nothing new and most of the software we program reinvents the same wheel. In contrast to Coke, It could be Orange juice where many companies can produce same orange juice and make business.

In Assembly or machine language days all software companies were locking business like Coke companies! There was a day when writing code required huge time and compilers were expensive. Now paradigm has changed. There are IDE, Wizard and tons of freely available snippets, that reduced cost of software. So its proven that hiding source code now give little advantage. In contrast if a programmer give away the source code in public domain he may invite our competitors to work on same code but market will expand dramatically. Such way it benefits a big community.

Not sure if you could get some idea from that. I would be happy to answer specific questions because we have always faced those questions.

Join our official forums

2010-04-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

We have been maintaining our forums in other sites and eventually have our own place. This should be best place for asking any questions or sharing code snippet and small tweaks. Let us know what you need and what type of features should be considered in next releases. For bug posting please write how should one regenerate the issue. Also keep a posting in bug tracker so it helps to look at tracker and fix faster.

visit http://floreantpos.com/support

A new release with better look in Subversion

2010-04-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

As promised, a new release has been updated in Subversion. There are many small changes and fixes

Printer configuration - Now all the printers will be automatically shown in drop down list.You don't even need JavaPOS for printing. Epson usually provides advanced printer driver in their installation CD. In other case contact the brand owner.

Printer receipt preview, you can also save receipt in PDF, DOC etc format

Eliminated prompting Beverage by guest count. Small restaurants do not need that.

Developers are requested to try it and send us their comment.

Send your suggestions to this email address. We will build binary end of this week.

Reasons you should try open source

2010-03-31T13:30:00.000-07:00

My reply submitted in Food service forum.

There is a funny story that once a man who moved to a new place asked a Car dealer how to go to nearby grocery. The grocery was infact 3 blocks away but the car dealer explained that he must buy a BMW because it would save time & money for buying fuel (because certain models were hybrid) and he could reach grocery store in only 3 minutes time (if he walk it would take 15 minutes, :()!

Here Le Crossant should not be deterred by XYZ compliance. He told he had been running a small coffee shop with Cash register. He needs a small solution. If he can go walking he may need a bike or small car. Not BMW. All XYZ compliance were to ensure rip off simple guys walking in front of store with FUD theory. If I were in his shoe, I would select any Decent system that has lowest installation cost, can be maintained by myself, or I can hire local technician or IT guy with few hours contract to customize to produce daily and weekly sales report.

Cost effective means if a shopping bag can be carried by one hand, spent few bucks for a Cart to make it easier but must say NO to any offer for riding elephants!

Everyone should try Open source before dealing with any closed soruce product. Two main reasons. First of all he does not need to pay single cent to use it as it is. ( I use Firefox and Apache - they don't charge any thing but their source is there). Well, there are FREE closed source products. Why should you avoid them? Because you never know if this is Free cheese in mouse trap, ie, if there are daemon under the hood, some day would change policy and force you to pay a lot , or die suddently, or ask your head for changing some report. In case of open source you have everything - including source code and your son who knows few lines of programming can fix typos. Or you can go to oDesk or Rent-a-coder or hire someone recompiling code in few bucks. Interestingly if you hang on the forum you can get same thing in almost at zero cost. Second reason its good is even the coders of open source die you still have source code to survive! Open source community also reports all known errors and often community users fix them. So they become less buggy than Polished Brands (I saw most of the Polished commercial software love to hide their bugtrackers)!

Open source is a new business paradigm. It does not lock you and its more secured than Hidden code ( who knows Free or low cost Closed soruce has a malware to track you). If some say hey your Software is not XYZ compliant, you just request original developer to make it! You may pay the same amount but you have full control in your hand.

FP Bug tracker

2010-03-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

Although Sourceforge forums are very useful and active we are requesting our users to submit bug, database issue, installation problem in this tracker. It will let developers to fix them in next releases.

Bug tracker system

Interesting error message

Genrom0 , one of our active users in Germany was getting some weird bug in discount system. To understand the problem our guys installed latest version from download page and tested in different ways. Nobody was getting the error. Suddenly it was found in screen shot that comma was used as decimal separator. When Genrom0 changed system locale to USA decimal was restored to "." (dot) and it worked fine. Anybody using our system in Germany should check this this . Things will be taken care when we will release the i18n package.

Download page redesigned

2010-03-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

Our official site has been redesigned by our great web developers in Moonrank (http://moonrank.com). Thanks folks, its well organized. Visitors can easily download latest Source code and Binary distribution in the same page( http://floreantpos.com/download ). Tutorials are also linked there. It was so tough to update too many links in different pages, now its much easier. Well, one more news. Should see a freshly built forum in our home page soon - just stay tuned.

How to compile Floreant POS source code in NetBean

2010-03-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

We have updated our wiki with step-by-step guide for setting up NetBean IDE. We also showed how to connect Database, compile source code and check your modified application in few easy steps.

Thank you Indokely for your valuable time.

Fun Idea: building large Touch screen with Wii Remote / Wiimote

2010-01-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

Does you Restaurant need a large Touch for training purpose?
Got inspired by Jonny Lee who hacked Wii Remote and turned the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen. He has released source code of a library that you can even build touch screen with large image in a LCD screen or even a projector. Don't like hacking? I found Ebay Sells a full kit in $149

Floreant POS Live Demo site

2009-12-24T13:53:00.000-08:00

We have hosted a small database server so that you can connect and test your POS client. You are free to access backoffice database, create new users and play around with Menu and Items. To access our Live demo server change server address as "livedemo.floreantpos.com".

For more about Live demo site click here

Installation of Floreant POS in Ubuntu

2009-12-20T14:18:00.000-08:00

Most linux distribution ships with Java alternative, but unfortunately Floreant POS does not work ok in that Java. You must install Sun Java and to make it work. To get Sun Java, you need to install Sun JRE. In ubuntu you can install Sun Java 6 like below

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin

When installation is complete you can set path for Java Sun or directly run as follows

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java -jar floreantpos.jar

Changes in our home page

2009-12-13T21:14:00.000-08:00

Made have major UI changes in our home page. Developers have successfully added search engine capability backed by GCS. There are cool tag clouds showing the most recent and popular searches. We hope this will greatly benefit the visitors.

Touch Screen UI Design Principle

2009-12-11T13:20:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately there are no standard among touch screen based software developers. Even Floreant POS team started on doing research on existing POS system. We learnt many of the existing POS are not touch screen friendly at all. To give an example one of known Open source POS ( mostly designed for retail stores) uses thin Scroll bar which is not easy to use.

Interestingly MSDN has great tips(although I read somewhere MS Word is at the top in UI hall of shame ;)). Anyway lets share some nice efforts by them.

1. Target Area
Research indicates that the minimum target area for efficient, accurate interaction using a finger is 6x6 millimeters (mm). This area translates to layout metrics as follows:

Font	Millimeters	Relative pixels	DLUs
9 point Segoe UI	6x6	23x23	13x13
8 point Tahoma	6x6	23x23	15x14

Furthermore, research shows that a minimum size of 10x10 mm (about 40x40 pixels) enables better speed and accuracy, and also feels more comfortable to users. When practical, use this larger size for command buttons used for the most important or frequently used commands.

2. System gestures

System gestures are defined and handled by Windows. As a result, all Windows programs have access to them. These gestures have equivalent mouse, keyboard, and application command messages:

System gesture	Synthesized equivalent message
Hover (when supported)	Mouse hover
Tap (down and up)	Mouse left-click
Double tap (down and up twice)	Mouse double left-click
Press and hold (down, pause, up)	Mouse right-click
Drag (down, move, up)	Mouse left-drag
Press, hold, and drag (down, pause, move, up)	Mouse right-drag
Select (down, move over selectable objects, up)	Mouse select

For more information, see SystemGesture Enumeration.

there are also other consideration including Control spacing, Control restrictions etc. I would recommend anyone to go through their page

How will you check Restaurant POS Systems?

2009-12-11T00:45:00.000-08:00

I was reading David's Blog. Here is something I like to share.

To run a successful restaurant business you need to have your basics right- i.e. good location, excellent cuisine, serving customers with a smile. However, this is not all. Now-a-days, there's another important aspect to consider - the restaurant pos software or the pos software system you use.

Although, hardware components like the monitors, computers or the printers are visibly essential, the pos software system is the nerve-center of the whole setup. Thus, a careful assessment is extremely necessary before you choose the best pos software.

How will you check restaurant pos systems?

First, it's important to know what exactly you need the POS software system to do. Good restaurant pos software should handle multiple menus, track orders, manage the work-flow, record transaction, process credit card payments, and many more. Once you are through with the functionalities of the POS software system that meets your basic requirements, do a test run to see how easy it is to use in your environment. While there would be ample scopes of learning for your staff when you adopt new restaurant pos software, choosing the best pos software should be easy to operate and should reduce the learning curve to manageable levels.

The best way to do this by creating multiple logins for your stuff (of course, any vendor offering restaurant pos systems should do this!) and let them run it in real-time situations. This will help them to find out the performance of the restaurant pos software under eccentric situations and help you to decide accordingly. The rules of thumb to select the best pos software are:

Security: The POS software system should provide with unique login option to every employee. You should be able to set access-levels to safeguard sensitive reports and functions to depending on positional hierarchy in your business, if desired.

Ease of use: In the POS software system, you should be able to change or edit orders, menus, payment options etc. whenever you want to. The interface should be so arranged that you can perform frequently used tasks with minimum key pressing or mouse-clicks.

Reporting: The best pos software should be able to generate detailed reports for owners and managers. Make sure the restaurant pos software you choose lets you get detailed information per order, per server, or menu-wise, ranging from daily to monthly.

Multiple access points: All popular restaurant pos systems are capable of taking orders from multiple locations (such as the bar, the kitchen, the take-away counter etc.). Make sure your POS software system also does so.

Finally, don't forget to purchase the hardware (like the printer and computer) from reputed vendors so that the rigors of multiple and frequent usage are sustained for a long time.

Floreant POS has already considered these features. So can visit and Download POS software free with source code from http:/www.floreantpos.com

Src: David Lacroix

Download Mirrors - CNET & Brother soft added Floreant POS

2009-12-08T20:54:00.000-08:00

Recent development in CNET - they added Floreant POS in their list. Also thanks to Brothersoft for adding download mirrors.

.
More:
DownloadPlex
ZDNet Asia
Our project has regular changes so check sourceforge for any minor updates.

Job portal for Floreant POS

2009-12-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

Community is the strength of Open source projects.

If you want to shop with limited budget to hire a developer join here. Even you may need to hire some local programmers to generate adhoc reports and support you.

Now, developers will also find it interesting. They can search for jobs and apply instantly.

Site is using another open source tool with minimum change in look. Its functionally ok.

Visit http://jobs.floreantpos.com

Developers' Wiki is Ready

2009-12-04T00:48:00.000-08:00

We setup a wiki for developers. Visit http://wiki.floreantpos.com

Some interesting pages in wiki are

Happy thanksgiving from Floreant POS team

2009-11-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

Wish you a very special Thanksgiving Day for all especially you who are using Floreant POS, referring us and encouraging this project every moment.

Ref: TJ8AWU4V4VR8

Touch screen button Innovation

2009-11-25T04:41:00.000-08:00

Touch Screen is cool but when users press touch screen it certainly miss feelings a solid button. Chris Harrison and Prof. Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon have developed a simple technology that turns touch screen buttons into physical buttons by using pneumatics.

The technology consists of a flexible surface area with a hard backing that acts as a mask for the button shapes. An air chamber behind the backing can be pressurized or depressurized using pneumatic technology, in this case fan-based pumps.

When positive pressure is applied, the buttons pop out. When the pressure is neutral, the screen is flat. When negative pressure is applied, the buttons pop inwards.

Such ergonomic touch screen technology may change the way restaurant apps would work.

For more technical details visit

Choosing database for a POS

2009-11-19T09:26:00.000-08:00

While developing an open source product its important to consider a matching database engine. Fortunately there are a number of stable database system already tested and recognized both web and Java applications. For Restaurants we required

A Public domain license so that we can distribute DB unconditionally with software.
Concurrent access - multiple clients may access
Embedded mode preferred ( to run in single work station)
Database joining, subquery and view especially for reports
Fast DB transaction but transactions my not be huge
Friendly with Java (since we already selected java)

Following matix shows a comparison among different DB engines. We have eventually selected Apache Derby because it fulfills most of the features. In addition it can be embedded as well as its license is more flexible than MySQL.

Apache Derby 10

MySQL 5

PostgreSQL 8

SQLite

Database Connections

Multiple

Concurrent Access to Multiple Databases

√

Embedded Database

√

Unicode
Support

√

Replication Support

√

License

Apache (BSD)

GPL

BSD

Public Domain

Specifications

SQL 99

√

SQL 92

√

Relational Database Features

Sequences/A
uto-increment Column

√

User Defined Functions

√

Update-capable Views

√

Referential Integrity

√

Triggers	Statement / Row Level
	Before / After
	Nesting
	Compound

√

SUBQUERY

√

OUTER JOIN

√

Name Length Limit

128

255

Delimited Identifiers

√

Stored Procedures

√

Technorati / QK5RE4N7N9S9

Qualities of a good restaurant point of sale software

2009-11-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

Cash drawer in a vital part but not all in a Restaurant. Whole process goes much beyond this and the success of your business depends on how effectively you manages everything related to your restaurant. Here, time is money for you and a good restaurant point of sale software is probably your best bet to help performing everything perfectly.

Think POS as a collection of devices
A restaurant manager POS or a bar POS system is essentially is a collection of devices that perform in an orchestrated way when your business runs in full swing. So naturally, such a robustness to run a system can only be expected from an experienced vendor selling restaurant point of sale software. The vendor must always ensure that the restaurant point of sale software should take care of everything from menu arrangement to staff performance in your restaurant.

Manage restaurant's cuisine & customer preferences
Besides providing adequate options to manage your restaurant’s cuisines, the restaurant manager pos system should help you to allocate and distribute your resources effectively as well. The centralized system should take and process data from every terminal in your restaurant. Also, besides managing the restaurant cash register, a good restaurant manager pos or bar pos system has flexible options to cater to your customers’ preferences in terms of table allocation, menu or payment.

Flexibility and features to change orders, menus and payments

A good restaurant point of sale software gives you flexible options to change or edit orders, menus, payment options etc. whenever you want to. In addition, the interface of the restaurant manager pos system is arranged in such a way that you could do all frequent tasks with the minimum key pressing or mouse clicking.

Reporting
The restaurant point of sale software can also help you with elaborate reporting for almost all activities performed through it. It can help you to get detailed information per order, per server, or menu-wise, ranging from daily to monthly and many more.

Right access for managers, servers and bartenders
Finally, a restaurant point of sale software is far more secured than a normal restaurant cash register. In good restaurant manager pos or bar pos system, you can set hierarchical access-rights for your managers, servers, bartenders, and above all for you as the owner. This will ensure that critical information related to revenue, wages etc. are not compromised at any level. In addition, almost all good restaurant point of sale software systems give adequate option to backup your data on online location on a periodical basis so that you are always free from system-crash or other similar issues.

Source: posqx Teachers paradise

Is Freeware enough? Why disclosure of Source code is so important?

2009-11-16T15:11:00.000-08:00

Software developer and Blogger Marco Milani wrote a nice article about pitfalls of "Freeware".

Software like Firebird, Firefox, Thunderbird, Freemind, Joomla, WordPress, Debian, Lingoes can be great but "All that glitters isn't gold"! Some threats may break the dream of completely free software.

First of all a software that is free today can not be free forever! A recent example comes from PostBox, a new e-mail client based on thunderbird (wrote by the former thunderbird's developers) originally claimed as "a free e-mail client" and switched to commercial in September once the first stable release appeared and after a lot of users tested the beta versions. In this case the testing of the user was free not the product!

Free mean "at your own risk"
If you pay nothing to get a things you also get no warranties about that things and no support in case of problems. If company stops giving away free you may have already been using it and you may realize FREE CHEESE IN MOUSE TRAP!

Open source is Preferred
Even open-source projects can die because of lack of development, but in case of crucial business involved the last chance is to directly support the development. Secondly when you have source code instead of waiting for next release you can customize it from the first day. Internet Explorer is one of the worst example of such Close source free product. Since release of IE 6.0 there were too many known bugs and and users who has been accustomed with IE had to live with that. Then next version of product had different problems. IE had even many critical bugs that took time to get fixed. If source code were in users' end they could fix it themselves.

Plan the way-out
Even if the project is promising good things try to answer the question:"what if the project will die?". Some ways out can be:

Start maintaining the code (maybe really expensive in term of resources...)
Switch to an existing fork or equivalent product
Build a new similar product from scratch
Buy a commercial version if exists

The way-out plan is mandatory if the free product or service is part of the core business. It would be unacceptable to build an important business over a weak solution or a solution with an uncertain future! You can only do that if you have source code in hand!

This means that in general is a bad choice to use free-closed-source software in core businesses.

James Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier - First Point of Sale Machine in History

2009-11-15T01:35:00.000-08:00

As I searched in Google I found that Retail point of sale systems have their roots in an 1870s Dayton, OH saloon. Deeming himself a "Dealer in Pure Whiskies, Fine Wines, and Cigars," owner/operator James Ritty had a successful business. But, like most business owners, he faced a growing issue of dishonest employees who frequently pocketed money from the customers instead of depositing it.

While on a steamboat trip to Europe, Ritty was intrigued by a mechanical device on the ship's propeller that tracked of the number of revolutions for maintenance purposes. Upon his return to Dayton, Ritty and his brother John began working to duplicate this idea to record cash transactions at the saloon with a mechanical device. In 1879, the Ritty brothers patented their invention as "Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier,"

or, as we know it today, the cash register.

The Ritty brothers opened a small factory in Dayton to manufacture their cash registers. Several years later, Cincinnati businessman Jacob H. Eckert bought the business from the Rittys and formed the National Manufacturing Company in 1881. He later sold it to John H. Patterson who continued making improvements to the cash register, including adding rolls of paper used to record each day's transactions.

In course of time, even though Cash register and POS has been serving same purpose, it has been evolved from Giant wheels and machines to the latest touch screen application.

src: Ritty's machine , Ritty

How to minimize stealing in Restaurants

2009-11-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

The National Restaurant Association estimates(1) that internal employee theft is responsible for 75% of inventory shortages-about four percent of total restaurant sales. Three quarters of employees steal from the workplace at least once-and half steal repeatedly. Why? Because no one catches them!

Many owners and managers ignore the signs because they want to believe all their employees are honest. But the longer you let dishonest employees get away with it, the more widespread employee theft will become. Here are six signs to look for:

Have Food & Beverage Costs suddenly gone up?
These can be determined by comparing how much Restuarant is purchasing with how much it is selling. If costs suddenly go up, detailed records may point to a specific event-such as a new bartender, kitchen worker or server's arrival. (If they go down, check to see who might be on vacation!) . Best way to prevent this is to log details of every transactions. How to get the reports
Is the cash register over or under on a regular basis?
If Restaurant owner regularly checks Cash drawer there must be exact or slightly different amount in cash drawer. If not, this is a sign that an employee has put money in the till without ringing up the order and has forgotten or miscalculated exactly what to skim from the register at the end of the shift. See Drawer pull
Do employee tips add up?
Many food servers offers extra food or intentionally Void foods to get more Tips. Tracking Void orders are one simple way to catch such stealing. Often there are courtesy drinks allocated for guests but food servers steal them and invite own friends to enjoy that.
Do regular customers complain that prices are too expensive or inconsistent
Employees may overcharge customers and pocket the difference. Cash drawer may look fine but customers should see an increase in prices. Whenever such complains come, owner should take it seriously. See Ticket
Customers or employees are telling you someone is stealing
Customers or employees may notice things restaurant owner can't. A thorough investigation often reveal regular stealing in restaurants.
Something about an employee that just doesn't feel right
Maybe it's a lifestyle that seems well beyond their means. Maybe they are just too eager to work the shifts that no one else wants to take. Whatever it is, restaurant owner should trust his instincts.

One of the way to minimize stealing is to use a quality Point of Sale where all transactions are recorded and could be cross checked with amount from drawer pull. Floreant POS is one of such open source application. For more visit
excerpt: fb

Feature list in slideshow

2009-11-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

Floreantpos Demo

View more documents from floreantpos.

Follow us in Twitter

2009-11-01T09:16:00.000-08:00

We eventually created a twitter account follow us for any further updates. http://twitter.com/floreantpos . Also support our open source initiative by pressing Retweet button in the right sidebar.

Why Prefer Open source

2009-10-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Like to quote form favorite business journalist Dana Blankenhorn

Preference for open source is based on a simple, easy to understand premise.An open source code base is your asset. A proprietary code base is someone else’s asset. Just so long as you understand what “your” and “someone else’s” mean.

Now it’s true that an open source asset is shared. But that’s why GPL code may be the best open source asset to have, if you’re not a software company. Everyone who has GPL code has an obligation to share their improvements. Other people are busy, right now, increasing the value of your GPL assets.

This calculation is true for businesses as well as governments. You don’t need a mandate, assuming you can sell the idea behind a preference to your staff. (Thanks to Matt Asay for his excellent essay on this subject.)

This is something managers in all kinds of enterprises — public, private, and philanthropic — often fail to do. There is a tendency everywhere to mandate. Business managers pass orders down the line without giving much thought to its impact on the people below them. It’s easier than selling.

Vendors take advantage of this to sell a preference for closed source to their customers. Employees are defending their jobs, and futures, by defending the vendor’s interests. Change vendors, even to open source, and your skills with Microsoft or Oracle code can seem worthless, your job may be at risk.

So there is a lot business can learn from the problems governments have in trying to mandate open source. If a Fortunate 500 company dumps Windows for Linux it can face the same resistance.

This can be a hard lesson for top management to learn. You advertise for technical help. You state the specific programs you want people to know. These skills are their assets, and if you make vendor changes — you will always make vendor changes — employees see their assets destroyed.

My dear wife of some decades talks about this all the time, in relation to her work. Her employers get new software and now only want experts in that stuff. The old people are vulnerable.

But people can learn, and people will learn if you give them the chance. The same minds that learned assembler can learn Java. The same minds that learned Oracle can learn mySQL.

Management attitudes are what need to change. Stop thinking of programmers as mere skill sets. They’re trained minds and willing hearts. Most are anxious to take on new skills. Give them a chance. Sell them, don’t just issue them orders.

That’s why preferences are better than mandates. Preferences begin a sales process, they give people a chance to learn new skills. Mandates are always a threat, or at least they are perceived as threatening.

Business and government aren’t really so different. Managing is managing, coding is coding. Treat people as they deserve to be treated and most will come good. Treat them as cogs in your machine and the friction will grind that machine down.

Sourece: ZDNET

Web based POS will not work!

2009-07-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

Web is emerging as application platform and many common office services are now moved to web. However there are places where desktop applications win! Let me focus some points why web does not work in POS, especially restaurant POS

Web pages (that's just what Web applications are inside a browser) run under a lot of restrictions. They cannot read files - leave alone writing to files from local PC. Biggest demerit of Web application is it cannot easily control required hardware like POS printer or Cash drawer.
Web cannot handle printing easily. Its not wise to say impossible but its cheaper to build Application that can handle individual Printers and also generate reports.

Reason to choose Hibernate for Floreant POS

2008-12-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

Florant POS is based on Hibernate, an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) solution for JAVA. It is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. It allows us to develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom – including association, inheritance and polymorphism.

From the day one we focused on quality and flexibility of code. . Here is a clearcut comparison between Hibernate and JDBC that supports reasons to choose hibernate. Source: Java sample

JDBC vs Hibernate

Mapping Java class to tables
With JDBC, developer has to write code to map an
object model's data representation to a relational data model and its
corresponding database schema.

Hibernate is flexible and powerful ORM solution to
map Java classes to database tables. Hibernate itself takes care of this
mapping using XML files so developer does not need to write code for
this.
Persistence of code
With JDBC, the automatic mapping of Java objects
with database tables and vice versa conversion is to be taken care of by
the developer manually with lines of code.

Hibernate provides transparent persistence and
developer does not need to write code explicitly to map database tables
tuples to application objects during interaction with RDBMS.
SQL & More
JDBC supports only native Structured Query
Language (SQL). Developer has to find out the efficient way to access
database, i.e. to select effective query from a number of queries to
perform same task.

Hibernate provides a powerful query language
Hibernate Query Language (independent from type of database) that is
expressed in a familiar SQL like syntax and includes full support for
polymorphic queries. Hibernate also supports native SQL statements. It
also selects an effective way to perform a database manipulation task for
an application.
Less coding in XML Mapping
Application using JDBC to handle persistent data
(database tables) having database specific code in large amount. The code
written to map table data to application objects and vice versa is
actually to map table fields to object properties. As table changed or
database changed then it’s essential to change object structure as well as
to change code written to map table-to-object/object-to-table.

Hibernate provides this mapping itself. The actual
mapping between tables and application objects is done in XML files. If
there is change in Database or in any table then the only need to change
XML file properties.
Generation of Java Object
With JDBC, it is developer’s responsibility to
handle JDBC result set and convert it to Java objects through code to use
this persistent data in application. So with JDBC, mapping between Java
objects and database tables is done manually.

Hibernate reduces lines of code by maintaining
object-table mapping itself and returns result to application in form of
Java objects. It relieves programmer from manual handling of persistent
data, hence reducing the development time and maintenance cost.
Database caching
With JDBC, caching is maintained by hand-coding.

Hibernate, with Transparent Persistence, cache is
set to application work space. Relational tuples are moved to this cache
as a result of query. It improves performance if client application reads
same data many times for same write. Automatic Transparent Persistence
allows the developer to concentrate more on business logic rather than
this application code.
Database update checking
In JDBC there is no check that always every user
has updated data. This check has to be added by the developer.

Hibernate enables developer to define version type
field to application, due to this defined field Hibernate updates version
field of database table every time relational tuple is updated in form of
Java class object to that table. So if two users retrieve same tuple and
then modify it and one user save this modified tuple to database, version
is automatically updated for this tuple by Hibernate. When other user
tries to save updated tuple to database then it does not allow saving it
because this user does not have updated data.