Terminals (tills)

Menu: Setup → Terminals · Who: owner (approves), branch manager

A branch is a place; a terminal is the till standing in it. Every sale is rung on one, and a terminal belongs to exactly one branch. The web POS and the Android app are the same thing here — a terminal row whose platform is web or android.

Why a till has to be registered

A cashier, a branch manager or a kitchen user cannot sign in without a live terminal. An owner and Sellify's own staff can (they read reports from a laptop), but ringing a sale — quoting, saving, paying, voiding — needs one from everybody.

Correcting a sale afterwards does not. The Orders panel is office work, and the payment a correction writes is credited to the till the sale was rung on.

Pairing a new till, start to finish

1. Get the branch's pairing code. Setup → Branches, open the branch. Press New code to roll it if it has been shared too widely.
2. On the device, open Sellify, type the pairing code and give the till a name ("Counter 1", "Drive-thru"). The device is not signed in yet — the code is what tells us which branch it is standing in.
3. The till now says "Waiting to be approved." The owner sees it on the dashboard (device(s) are waiting for you to approve them) and on Setup → Terminals, where the row carries Approve and Reject. Letting a device in is the owner's call — a branch manager sees the request and cannot answer it.
4. Once approved the device collects its own token and is ready. The token is handed over once and never shown again — we keep only a fingerprint of it.

The list

What a shop can do itself

• Disable terminal — a lost or stolen tablet, immediately. It loses its token there and then. Do this first and ring us second.
• Release the counter — a cashier went home without signing out and nobody else can get on. Releases the session; the release is on the record.
• Sell without internet — per till, on by default. Turn it off for a device you would rather refuse a sale than have selling on last-hour prices. See The Android till.
• Order types this till takes — a branch trades several ways at once, and a counter usually does one job. Tick Delivery and Takeaway on the delivery desk and it will not ring a dine-in order; tick nothing and the till takes whatever the branch trades, which is how every till starts. It only ever narrows: stop trading delivery at the branch and the delivery desk stops too. A till that does not take dine-in cannot settle a dine-in bill either, so park a table on a till that takes them.
• Receipt printer — the till's own default. Branch default means it follows the branch.
• Retire terminal — the till is gone for good.

Only the owner approves, rejects or switches a terminal back on (Enable on a disabled row). A re-enabled terminal pairs again from scratch and waits for approval again — switching a till back on is not the same as trusting a device again.

One cashier at a time

While somebody is signed in on a terminal, another user's sign-in is refused. That is deliberate: two cashiers on one drawer is how a shortage becomes nobody's fault. Use Release the counter when somebody has genuinely gone.

When the serial does not match

A device is bound to itself — an Android serial, or a random id a browser generates once and keeps. If it does not match, the sign-in is refused and says so. It never quietly re-binds. Register the device again and the owner approves it again.

A device that still holds its own valid token may re-pair itself without asking (an app reinstall). Every re-pair is on the record.

Moving a till to another branch is not re-pairing it. Type the new branch's pairing code and the till goes back into the queue for that branch — it stops selling until the owner approves it there, exactly like a new device. That is deliberate: re-pairing means "I am the same till", and letting a device in somewhere is not the till's own decision.

Before you move one, empty its outbox and settle every table it is holding. Unsynced work belongs to the branch it was rung at, and the till is not going to be signed in there any more.

Everything is on the record

Registered, approved, rejected, disabled, enabled, re-paired, released, signed in, signed out — each one writes a line with who, when and why.

Terminals count against your plan

Every plan caps its tills. A company that already has as many working tills as its plan allows is refused at the pairing screen — the device is told Terminal limit reached there and then, and nothing is queued for the owner to refuse later. Retire a till you no longer use, or upgrade the plan. The cap is checked again when the owner approves, because two devices can queue for the last till and only one of them may have it. A till that is already working is never refused for the slot it already holds. See Billing.