TUAW Review: Checkout, top notch Point of Sale software for Mac

I had the opportunity to speak with the creators of Checkout: an excellent Point of Sale application for the Mac. I've been working with the app for several weeks now and have been thoroughly impressed by it, especially after the developers shared their perspectives. Many thanks to Ed and Dirk for walking me through it.

Whether you're starting a new store or transferring your current system to Checkout, it's the best Point of Sale I've worked with in my many years of retail. The creators explained that they designed Checkout to help small and mid-sized retail stores make sales, print receipts, manage stock, organize customers, and collect payments.

This application focuses heavily on ease-of-use in everything from installation to managing metrics and allows the user to remove "unneeded complexities" from the system they work with every day.

Read on for a full walk-through of the application.

From the first launch of the application, you can be up and running in just 15 minutes. If you're switching from another POS, I'll cover some of the transition options a little later in the article. Right now, we're gonna attack this as though we're a brand new store that's never had a customer and is ready to add products so they can make sales. Before you do anything else, you should visit the General tab to set up store options and the Taxes tab to get city and state taxes as applicable.

One hidden feature that I want to mention right up front: in the above picture, you see the customer list. At the bottom, you can click the cog wheel and export individuals or all customers to your address book in vCard, CSV or other standard formats. I was looking for a way to get some customers on my iPhone and missed this feature... so I thought I would point it out.

Product management is very easy with this system: from the stock room, you can click new product, type in the name, assign a code, default cost and the selling price. You can also add a description to the product which will flow nicely into some invoice templates as well as the online store features. Also, one of the most requested features in earlier versions of Checkout has been added in this version; you can now mark each product as physical inventory. This is great for companies that offer services and not just physical products. Once you have items in your products database, you can move to the suppliers tab, add a supplier, create a purchase order and check it in. Voila! You're ready to sell. That covers the Products, Suppliers, General, and Taxes tabs... let's move on to Reports.

According to the developers, they "built the Reports feature to give business owners/managers a quick overview to see how their business is doing." This tab lets you take a look at every aspect of the store in one place. It's really a great way to see your metrics at a glance. Right next to Reports, you'll see Ledger that can integrate with AccountEdge or QuickBooks -- making your life even easier.

The Template tab allows you customize the look and feel of the invoices you'll give to your customers. You can also download additional templates from Checkout's website. After choosing a template, you can add custom images and tweak other aspects of it including the footer -- which I used for my legal jargon. If you're feeling adventurous and know HTML and CSS, you can do even more customization by following the documentation they have listed here.

One of my favorite features of this application is the new EnStore online store. While it's still in beta, it seems to be very polished. Within the products database, you can enable the online store to display each item and attach a picture (800 by 800 max) for your customers' visual pleasure. The description that I mentioned before will also translate from the product management tab to the online store. Take a look at their online demo and see what it has to offer. It even comes with an online configuration tool -- there you can choose a theme and modify your web store. The developers were very excited about the release of their design tools... they're almost ready for public consumption. While this is still in beta, everything is free: once out of beta, you can choose between the free option, $39 or $99 per month (4%, 2% or 1% transaction fee respectively).

Since we're talking about pricing, let's discuss some of the options that Checkout offers: the first is the single user license that costs $399. Don't forget to download the free trial [download app] before you buy. The fully functional trial lasts 30 days so you can learn the software (which is already very intuitive) before you decide to buy it.

Each sales station will need a copy of the application, but they can connect to the host database on your main machine with the addition of the Checkout Server add-on -- it's free. If you purchase 3-4 licenses, you get 10% off. 5+ licenses will get you 15%. They have hardware packages available from $999 (including a license) as well. Going one step further, you can integrate a credit card scanner and with the packages offered, process payments directly through Checkout. If you decide on one of those packages, you can basically get Checkout and other integrated applications to manage all aspects of your business without fighting between them.

That's the walk-through of the application; it does what it does very well. If you're looking to switch from your current POS to Checkout, they include a handful of import/export functions throughout the application that will make the transition easier... it still won't be a mirror image of the source and will require tweaking, but much better than moving everything by hand.

After using this application for a few weeks, I'd really like to see more invoice and web store templates available for the people who aren't that awesome with HTML code -- like me. After talking with the developers, I found that I'm not the only one who wants that (go figure) and they're currently working on getting more templates added. They're also working on automatic sync between EnStore and Checkout, improvements to the label printing feature, and product recommendations. If you've scanned an item into an order, Checkout would actually make recommendations for good add-ons for that sale. I'm really looking forward to that one... anything to help improve metrics! They also want to do "something something images at least" -- which, translated to English, means they've done a lot of work adding the ability to assign images to products for the web store and want to do more with it, but have yet to decide what that will be.

There's so much more to this application and there's no way I could realistically cover all of it in one post. If you have more questions about the application, leave them in the comments... I'll try to answer them and the developers may even chime in for a few.

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Source: http://checkoutapp.com/

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I had the opportunity to speak with the creators of Checkout: an excellent Point of Sale application for the Mac. I've been working with...

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Gus

I've been using Checkout for few months now and I am not complete satisfied with it... I am not a store but I have similar flow as I operate as a small distributor. So, the software has most of the features I need but...

It would be great if they improve the following:

1) Every time you revise an order that has been invoiced, it changes the order number. This creates confusion. I know you don't want to mess with your bookings but if the invoice hasn't been paid, why can't you revise the order, generate a new invoice and keep both under each original number?

My customers split delivers, change deliver mode, and change their orders all the time. If there is need for a revision, the system reads it as a new order or invoice. I tried to find a solution for it and I ended up having tons of orders & invoices I would like to clean out of my system.

Also, I use a PDF file out of the order feature as an order confirmation to my customers and you can see that changing order numbers creates tons of confusion and multiple files on both sides. I guess, you could use the feature Quote but I believe it does change the numbers too... and this is a quote, I am not quoting anything...

2) It would be nice if we could email an order, as order confirmation. Same thing with invoices. Email capabilities would be a great addition here... What about a credit card authorization form? That would be awesome!

3) We should be able to invoice parts of the order too, leaving the rest to be shipped or canceled later. Again, please keep the same order number and generate multiple invoices after that.

4) Invoices should display a sub-total without freight. I think it is confusing to see total + freight together. It makes it harder to easily double check and make sure you have all products ordered by the customer when you are looking at the dollar amount.

5) You should be able to edit freight on the invoice once it can change at the last minute.

6) Invoices should have space for comments.

February 12 2010 at 11:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tiffany Edwards Hunt

Just ordered Checkout from Amazon for our surf shop on the Big Island, and I'm looking for guidance.

How do I get a barcode scanner and printer? Can this eventually work on an ipad? Is Leopard recognizing the first version of Checkout? So many questions.

Developers, we would love to be your Big Island showcase for the Jeff Hunt Surfboards e-store via Checkout.

Please help us get Checkout savvy.

Mahalo.

February 01 2010 at 12:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

lori

Is it capable of handling products on consignment and keeping those sorts of records and data?

December 26 2009 at 4:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sven D

Overall it's a good product. We started with Checkout 1.x - back when it was owned by MadeBySofa based in the Netherlands. No problems, everything was great. With 2.x then it took months to get a localized version (but promises to ship it asap all the time).

Worst experience so far with the customer support (= there is none if you haven't signed a paid support plan). We would simply like to reinstall Checkout on the same Macmini (but on SL) and needed to reactivate our Checkout version - which was not working, even after de-activation of the former installation etc. We wrote several emails, tried to get someone on the phone - no response at all.

And: there is no upgrade path for loyal customers (without the mentioned support plan).

We are currently discussion if it's maybe the right time to change to LightSpeed - or even a Windows based solution.

December 21 2009 at 9:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gildas

I'd like to know if it is planned to add Gift Card functionality to Checkout. It is a nice feature of LightSpeed. With this feature, Checkout would be hell of a product !

December 20 2009 at 9:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ibrahim

I am having the same problem with printing. Actually I don't really need to print, I need to open the cash drawer.

Any help on this?

December 19 2009 at 1:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Richard

I just started using Checkout and I have problems setting it to print reciepts automatically after recieving payment. Is this how the app works or am I not setting something right?
i will appreciate any insight.

December 17 2009 at 6:24 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

TerriZJ

Hi everyone:
For the features and quality of this software, the pricing is downright inexpensive (for those commenting on the pricing). It compares very favorably with POSIM for features, so not sure what the person saying it's too expensive was comparing this to.

This fully-loaded, easy-to-use package really makes getting up and running for the holiday season quick and easy.

And if you need accounting, as some of you are mentioning, it integrates nicely with AccountEdge (MYOB) and QuickBooks. I especially like the ending tills report for tracking what staff is doing, plus you can get reports and up-to-the-minute inventory levels at any time.

Finally, I like that if you add a second till, you don't need a consultant - you can quickly and easily add the second one on yourself! The software uses Bonjour to network!

November 30 2009 at 10:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

rasmus

@Niiconn.

That program looks really good also, but i still miss the account plan option, and i miss a function so that i can see how much tax I must pay each 3rd month (thats how it works in denmark).

darnn.. still stuck at Economacs..

November 25 2009 at 10:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

rasmus

"jOrtiz said 2:31AM on 11-24-2009

Unless you are planning to re-sell the printer, you wouldn't. Checkout is point of sale software, not accounting."

Yeah i realised that :-)

Iam looking for accounting software with same look and feel like checkout, but can't seem to find any.. why is it so hard to make accounting software look good? :-)

I need a program that works for Denmark tax system (value added tax). I currently use Economacs but it looks soo borring.. T_T... Also i don't really like any of those online account sites... i want a local program.

Any suggestions?

November 24 2009 at 12:00 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to rasmus's comment

Rob Schneider

@rasmus: You may check out Grandtotal: http://www.grandtotal.biz/GrandTotal/

November 25 2009 at 3:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jOrtiz

@rasmus

I second TerriZJ on recommending AccountEdge (MYOB). While it isn't as shiny as Checkout, it most certainly has a Mac interface. It's all I use with my clients here in the US for their accounting needs. The catch: I don't know how it will do in Denmark. Have a look at it to see if there are any constraints if there aren't any or maybe something needs a work-around, contact a consultant. I always recommend J.F. White Ltd. Jonathan is based in the UK and would have a better understanding of EU taxes and how to possibly set the software up for you.

November 30 2009 at 1:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply