In-house development of EPOS software

One of the best ways to ruin your small retail business is to opt to develop retail EPOS software in house. Although this route is quite attractive for very large retailers, any small business trying to develop their own EPOS software is going to struggle.

Initially the idea of writing your own EPOS software appears very attractive. You have probably got an employee, or family member who is proficient at using something like Microsoft Access or Visual Basic to produce simple applications - perhaps you are already using one or two little systems they have put together to help run your business. Maybe a customer database, or repair logger. Sooner or later, when the subject of a new EPOS system arises, it is natural to think of writing the entire system in-house. After all, you are already paying for that member of staff, so they ought to do something useful!

Some businesses arrive at the in-house solution by examining some of the standard EPOS software on the market, and find that it doesn't do quite what you want, and some peculiarity of your business is not handled in quite the workflow you want.

The first reason that these sort of projects ultimately fail is an underestimation of how complicated and large even simple EPOS software needs to be. It has to work well in a number of areas, like receipt printers, chip and pin machines. What about VAT? How about customer refund exchanges? This means the project takes vastly longer than first expected because of the number of fundamental functions that need to go into modern EPOS retail software.

The second problem lies a few months down the road when you need to produce figures for your accountant. Suddenly you discover that you've got a retail system created by a part time programmer with no experience in transaction processing software. They don't have the basic reports you need. Maybe the correct data isn't even stored! You can't actually get the data out of the system in a meaningful manner - and what's worse, the whole enterprise may be botched because everything is messed up with data errors - errors in a database which has no proper thought out structure.

It takes years for a dedicated company to learn all the pitfalls of writing EPOS software - no single person working part time on a project will get close to the quality of the product that comes from a proper software house.

The worst problem comes and bites you a year or so down the line. The family member looses interest in a EPOS software, the staff member leaves and you are left with a terrible piece of retail software that nobody can maintain and nobody can get any decent data out of it. No third party will touch it, largely because it was badly written by an amateur. You then have to start on the road to buying proper EPOS software after wasting lots time and money on your failed in-house EPOS software.

The number of retail businesses looking for a new EPOS system because they can no longer maintain their in house retail software is quite large - it is a very common story.

Software houses producing retail systems for small businesses are experts at getting their software to work in unusual business situations - they've seen it all, and a the specialists. If you wouldn't dream of services your car, don't think you can become a mechanic overnight!

So please do not try and write your own EPOS software. Go out and choose from the large number of Retail solution packages available to the small retailer- if they don't do quite what you want, then pay to have it changed - this will always be cheaper and more effective than trying to write your own software from scratch.