Getting Started

Getting Started

This is the User Manual for the people who run the store day to day — cashiers, supervisors, managers — and for whoever installs and operates the system. It assumes nothing about what you've seen before.

What this is

The system is a point-of-sale for one business running several locations. It handles both kinds of selling from the same order:

• Retail — scan a barcode, take a payment, done in under a minute.
• Food service — open a tab against a table, add items over an hour, split the bill at the end.

Underneath, both are the same thing: open an order, add lines to it, take money, close it. You won't notice the shared plumbing day to day — a retail register looks like a cart screen, a food register looks like a floor of tables — but it means a receipt behaves the same way everywhere, and a manager's reports cover both without translation.

The three surfaces

Surface	Who uses it	How it signs in
Register	Cashiers and supervisors, at a physical till	A device token (once, per terminal) plus a staff PIN (every shift)
Back office	Managers and admins	An email and password — no till involved
API	The two apps above, and nothing else you should be talking to directly	Whatever the calling app is signed in as

The register and the back office are separate applications on separate screens (and, in production, separate web addresses) — a cashier's till never loads back-office code, and a manager's laptop never needs a device token. Both talk to the same API underneath, so a sale rung up at the till shows up in the back office's reports immediately.

Roles

Three roles cover everything. They're deliberately coarse:

• Cashier — rings up sales, opens and closes their own shift, takes payments.
• Supervisor — everything a cashier can do, plus the actions that let money or stock leave the business without a customer noticing: voids, discounts, refunds, and approving a till's cash variance.
• Admin — full access, including the back office (catalog, staff, locations, reports, the audit trail). Admin is a property of the person, not a role assigned per location — an admin is an admin everywhere.

Cashier and supervisor are assigned per location: someone can be a cashier at one store and a supervisor at another, and the two don't mix.

Note: a supervisor action isn't a separate PIN prompt layered on top of a cashier's session — there is no such prompt. Every supervisor-only screen and button is simply gated by whoever is currently clocked in at that till. In practice, a cashier who hits something that needs a supervisor (a void, a discount, a refund) clocks out, the supervisor clocks in with their own PIN to do the one thing and clocks out again — or the supervisor is already the one running that till for the shift. See the Supervisor Guide.

Signing in

There are three separate sign-in flows, one per surface.

Enroll a register (once per terminal)

The first time a till is used, it shows an Enroll this terminal screen asking for a device token. This only happens once per terminal — after that, the till remembers it.

1. Get a device token for this register. In development, make seed prints one per till (see the Operator Guide's First run); in production, a manager issues one from the back office by reissuing the register's token — that's also how a brand-new till gets its first one (see the Manager Guide's Replace a lost terminal section, which also covers a brand-new till's first token).
2. Paste it into the field (placeholder 1|xxxxxxxx…) on the Enroll this terminal screen.
3. Tap Save.

Note: a device token is the terminal's identity, not a person's. It stays valid until a manager reissues it — see the Manager Guide's guidance on replacing a lost terminal.

Clock in with a PIN

Once a register is enrolled, it shows an Enter PIN screen every time nobody's signed in — at open, and after the previous person's shift or session ends.

1. Type your 4–6 digit PIN.
2. Tap Clock in.

Note: five wrong PINs in a row locks that register out for 60 seconds. This is deliberate — PINs are short, and the lockout is what makes a short PIN safe to use at all.

Sign in to the back office

The back office has its own Sign in screen — email and password, no till and no device token involved.

1. Enter your email and password.
2. Tap Sign in.

Only admins can sign in to the back office in this version — see the Manager Guide.

Where next

You are...	Go to
A cashier ringing up sales	Cashier Guide
A supervisor handling voids, discounts, refunds, or variance	Supervisor Guide
A manager running catalog, staff, locations, or reports	Manager Guide
Whoever installs, deploys, or backs up the system	Operator Guide