Point of sale (POS) or checkout is the place where a retail transaction is completed. It is the point at which a customer makes a payment to a merchant in exchange for goods or services. At the point of sale the merchant would use any of a range of possible methods to calculate the amount owing, such as a manual system, weighing machines, scanners or an electronic cash register. The merchant will also normally issue a receipt for the transaction.

For small and medium-sized retailers, the POS will be customized by retail industry as different industries have different needs. For example, a grocery or candy store will need a scale at the point of sale, while bars and restaurants will need to customize the item sold when a customer has a special meal or drink request. The modern point of sale will also include advanced functionalities to cater to different verticals, such as inventory, CRM, financials, warehousing, etc., all built into the POS software. Prior to the modern POS, all of these functions were done independently and required the manual re-keying of information, which resulted in a lot[vague] of errors.

What sets it apart from the other available POS softwares is that it has been developed for the local stores,which still do not use any kind of automated bill generation system because of the complexity and cost factors. It has been developed keeping in mind their needs and abilities.

This project can be widely used in many departmental stores and can be used to cater to the need of the sales system there. This is a desktop based application and can be used to maintain / control most of the activities happening in stores. This maintains and controls the stock details and does billing. First to enter this system the users has to login to this system. Basically there are 3 types of users in this system.

1.  Admin users - Have full access to all the modules of this system.
   

2.  Manager users - Have access to manager and salesperson modules.
   

3. Salesperson users- Have access to salesperson module only.

• First a login screen should be displayed to get the user details. The user has to enter the user-id and the password. The password is masked with character

• The user details should be verified against the details in the user tables and if he / she is valid user, they should be entered into the system. Once entered, based on the user type access to the different modules to be enabled / disabled.

• If user enters wrong password he/she would be prompted invalid user message.

This module is used to maintain the various products available in the store. Each product available in the store should be classified under a product category. This module will be enabled only to the admin and manager type of users.

In order to achieve our goals we have made use of tools and languages which are supposedly famous for very light on their hardware requirements. Java is used as the primarily tool because of its costless nature and also because of the fact that it is an open source product with vast growth potentials.