Manual: Retail admin & back office

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This manual covers the back-office side of running a retail workspace: getting products into the catalog, managing who you buy from, and the full purchasing chain from order to posted stock. For the till itself, see Manual: Retail till & billing.

Everything here is ADMIN/OWNER work (a few screens are AGENT-readable too) - it's the setup a cashier never needs to touch.

Getting started: setting up your business

Before your first real sale, a handful of one-time setup screens need to be filled in. Do these in order the first time you turn on Retail POS for a new workspace - once done, nobody has to think about them again until something changes (a new tax rate, a new till, a new hire).

Everything you need - both one-time setup and day-to-day till work - lives under Settings → Open Commerce POS. This page is your map: setup cards at the bottom, till/shift cards at the top.

1. Tax & currency

This is the single screen every price and every printed invoice reads from. Set your currency, your tax system (GST for India, VAT for Europe, or none at all), and whether the prices you type elsewhere already include tax (MRP-inclusive, the norm in India) or are tax-exclusive (the norm in Europe) - the same app runs both models, this toggle is what decides which one your workspace uses.

Fill in your GSTIN and legal business name if you're on GST - these print on real invoices. Bill rounding and its precision control how the final total on a bill gets rounded (to the nearest rupee, for instance). Further down, Approval thresholds set two spend-control limits: how much discount a plain cashier may give without a manager's sign-off (Cashier discount ceiling %), and whether selling below cost always needs approval.

2. Staff roles

A commerce role is separate from someone's platform role (Owner, Admin, Agent, Member) - it's what a person is allowed to do specifically at the till: Owner, Admin, Manager, Cashier, Counter, Server, Kitchen, or Storekeeper. Nobody can use the till features at all until they hold at least one of these.

Pick a staff member and a role, then click Assign. Do this once for yourself too - you'll need a commerce role before you can set your own PIN (next step) or clock in at a till.

A real team usually ends up looking like this: a cashier for day-to-day billing, a manager who can approve discounts and settlements, and an owner who can do everything.

3. My PIN

Once you hold a commerce role, set a short numeric PIN - this is how you identify yourself at a shared till without logging in and out on a shared device.

4. Terminals

A terminal is one physical till device - a counter, a tablet, a POS machine. Register every device you'll actually bill from.

5. Reasons & pay modes

Two small masters that drive dropdowns you'll see constantly at the till.

Reasons are the typed explanations required for sensitive actions - cancelling a bill, reprinting a receipt, giving a discount, returning stock. A sensible default set is already seeded for you; add your own where the built-ins don't fit (e.g. "Damaged in transit").

Pay modes are the tender types your till offers at checkout - Cash, Card, and UPI are seeded by default. Add more (cheque, wallet, store credit) if you accept them, with an optional commission/service-charge percentage and GL account code for your books.

6. The go-live checklist

This is your literal punch list before opening for real trade: masters ready, inventory loaded, suppliers loaded, customer credit balances and supplier payables carried over from your old system (if any), and a final reconciliation of your legacy stock value against what the system computes. Steps you genuinely don't need can be marked Skipped rather than left hanging.

With that done, you're ready for the real day-to-day: the product catalog and purchasing chain below, then opening your first business day and billing.

The product catalog

Every product shows its on-hand quantity and stock value at a glance, batch-aware (a product can have several batches at different costs or expiry dates - "1 batch" here just means nothing's split yet). Search narrows the list instantly; Show archived brings back discontinued items if you need to reference one.

Adding stock quickly

Click Add stock for the fast path - useful for a small shop that doesn't need a full purchase order for every delivery.

Type a product name - if it matches an existing product, this adds a new batch to it rather than creating a duplicate. The price/discount/unit chips are shortcuts; you can always type an exact value instead. Category and Location are optional.

Suppliers

The "Whom do I owe" banner is a live rollup across every open bill - click into a supplier at any time to see their own balance and history.

Only Name is required. Active controls whether the supplier shows up when creating a new bill or purchase order - turn it off instead of deleting a supplier you've stopped using, so old bills keep their history.

The purchasing chain

This is the full paper trail from "I want to order stock" to "it's on the shelf and the supplier is owed money": Purchase order → Goods acknowledgement → GRN. Each stage is a real, separate document - nothing is skipped or implied.

1. Purchase order

Search the supplier, pick a purchase/delivery date, then search and add as many product lines as you need. Click Create - the order starts as a Draft.

The delivery status ("UnDelivered" here) tracks itself automatically - it flips once a Goods acknowledgement references this order, and again once a GRN is actually posted against it.

2. Goods acknowledgement

A lightweight "the truck arrived" record - registered the moment goods show up at the door, before anyone's had time to count and check quality.

Pick the supplier, then fill in whatever's on the delivery paperwork - LR number, the vendor's own bill number/date, gross amount and GST if you have them yet. Nothing here is final; it's a placeholder for "something arrived, we'll reconcile it properly at GRN time."

An Open acknowledgement is exactly what the next GRN step looks for.

3. GRN (goods receipt note) - the step that actually moves stock

This is where quantities get counted for real, cost/GST gets entered line-by-line, and - once posted - stock and the supplier's payable both update for real. Nothing before this point touched your actual inventory numbers.

Pick the Open goods acknowledgement, then enter each line's received quantity, basic cost, and GST% - these can genuinely differ from what the purchase order originally said, since this is what really arrived and what the invoice really says.

Once posted, the GRN is GRN-2026-XXXXXX - a permanent record. The supplier's own "Whom do I owe" balance now reflects this bill.

Who can do what

Related: Manual: Retail till & billing · Manual: Food production