First of all, I’d like to thank the developers of Samba PoS for such a wonderful open source project. I’ve been digging around this program for a while and I really like the customization features. It’s really great.
I do have a question though which I can’t seem to find a straight answer to, and I hope you can help me out.
Say, my cafe has regular customers who sometimes like to pay every 3-4 days. So, what I want to do is create accounts for them, so that they can pay their bills later on. Now I seem to have a problem with ending the WORKING PERIOD, and thus cannot save anything these customers have purchased so far. This is very crucial to me as I would need this feature if I was to use Samba in the future for my cafe/restaurant that I currently own. So all I need is to create an account named “John” where I can throw in items, and save them, thus being able to end the working period, so that John can come back 2-3 days later, order something else, and then pay for everything he has ordered for the past week.
Is this possible? If so, can someone help me out with a tutorial?
Yep this is a standard part of samba, create a new customer entity for every customer you want to have an account
Once created you can edit them and youll see a button to create account, press that and thats it
Now when adding items to the ticket be sure to add the customer entity, providing you created an account for them as above when you go to settle screen the account payment button is active, press this to have the ticket paid onto the customers account
Okay just to clarify what @RickH said, this is already a part of Samba.
What you will be doing is:
1- Create Customers Accounts for clients you want.
2- Actually “sell” to those clients but instead of receiving cash or credit card payments you’ll receive them on CUSTOMERS ACCOUNT … which will add up the money they owe you. Later you’ll be able to receive cash from them and lower their debt.
Excuse me for the double post. I have figured out the customer account deal, now I have another problem.
See, I saved the items the account has to pay later, but when I end the work period, and go to work period reports, the items show up as sold…but the customer didn’t pay… how can I avoid that?
They are paid. They are paid by customer account. When customer comes in to pay you go to accounts click his account and pay on balance. Reports will even show they were paid using customer account.
Yes I understand. But the customer haven’t actually paid, the amount was just saved to pay later. This will mess up the total income balance at the end of the day… I only want the amount to show up in the end of the day report when the customer actually PAYS and not when I just save his check on his account to pay later.
In reports the amount “saved” to customers account is displayed in separate exactly for that purpose, you’ll have incomes for cash, credit card, voucher and customers account … just subtract that one and you’ll have real amount of money at hand.
After I save an amount to customer’s account. Say there is 500$ on the customers account and he comes and pays it the next day. This 500$ doesn’t show up anywhere at all! I mean, it’s not in the end of the day reports. How come? This way, I have to keep track of customer’s reports apart from the main reports of the day… this is just pain. Why can’t these 500$ that are paid be counted in the report? Damn… all this is complicated.
You basically need two separate reports at end of day. Work period report displays what sold and how it settled. Second report you need is Cash Report. You’ll basically print Cash Account Transactions for that work period or create an additional account screen. You can also use custom reports module to prepare a report ready to print in reporting section.
The main reason we don’t have a built in report for cash transactions is there are different ways to track cash flow in SambaPOS and you should configure your accounting screen as you need. Customer Payments is not the only thing you’ll want to track. You also pay wages, bills, buy stuff and these should be reported together in a single report.
I’ll strongly recommend you to review accounting features. You’ll like it.
There are lots of extremely useful samples. You may find even more if you search forums.