Mark Daniels: EPoS on a shoestring

Twitter​ is amazing. In February this year, Stephen Fry kept subscribers on tenterhooks after raising the alarm via the short-message blogging service that he was stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of London's Center Point building.

Since then, stories of derring-do, tails of woe and general nitter-natter have exploded on the Twitter service, and today there's a rather nice community of publicans, journalists and other extraneous members of the trade who use it to keep in touch with each other, offer help and support, find out what's going on in the industry and, in general, promote their businesses.

Some believe that the honeymoon period for Twitter is over, and that - like many fads - its light will fade soon, but I still think it's an excellent service. Mainly because, thanks to many people who read my tweets, I've spent the summer building myself a new EPoS system.

Right at the start of the school summer holidays, my existing till decided to break. As Mr Fry himself might have said: arse, poo and widdle.

Now, my Twitter account doesn't have anywhere close to the 747,642 followers that Stephen's does, but after an engineer came out and announced that it was going to cost £250 to repair my existing unit I decided to put a cry for help out to the Twitter community and see if anybody could offer alternative suggestions. I wasn't so much worried about the cost but, if I had to spend that amount, what could I have instead?

And the response was staggering. Companies specialising in EPoS systems dropped me a line, other publicans recommended businesses that might be able to repair it cheaper, and I even received one generous offer of a spare till until I could get mine sorted. I was staggered, but then somebody got in touch and suggested that I grab an old pc and build my own till system, using open source software available on the Internet.

The idea intrigued me, but was still potentially financially restrictive as I didn't have the necessary hardware available. Until somebody offered to donate me an old pc they had lying around.

The software we used was OpenBravo's POS, a system designed specifically as a Point-of-Sale application, predominately for use with touch screen monitors. Being open source, it's free to download but doesn't receive professional support. I'm not completely au fait with the workings of such technology, or their related databases, but a friend kindly donated his time to get the application installed on the pc and to make sure the database worked.

We then found ourselves with another dilemma: how do you make a computer open a till drawer? There are several solutions, either expensive or requiring a deft touch with the soldering iron. That was when an opticians in Cambridge came to our rescue, offering us a receipt printer that connects to the PC but then uses a connection to the existing till drawer, which still worked fine. The idea: the software tells the printer to issue a receipt and the printer then sends the signal to the drawer to open. No further fancy applications need to be installed to make this work - it happened, as if by magic.

Next came the hard work and, this summer, I've been spending every spare minute that has not been involved with working the bar or playing with the children by programming the software until I'd developed a nice little system that seemed to work logically for my pub. It's taken some time (certainly a lot longer than just paying the engineer to fix the old till!) but it became a bit of a hobby through the summer holidays. It's fair to say, too, that for my little village pub it's almost certainly overkill - but I was proud of the end result.

Indeed, the story of me and my mates building our own EPoS system for the pub attracted a great amount of interest from our customers, who regularly asked how we were getting on with it. I'm sure they were all a bit disappointed when the till equivalent of Doc Brown's first ice-making machine (Back To The Future III) didn't actually appear.

Instead, a rather neat little system was built and all seemed well - until I realised I hadn't got a touch screen monitor, and trying to use a keyboard and mouse on the bar would become tedious, to say the least.

Ebay came to the rescue, with a brand new 15-inch POS screen weighing in at £150.

Finally, at the start of this week, the whole system was ready to go live. Despite all the testing in the office, there would be no proof in the pudding until the till was on the bar and the staff were using it - and when it worked, and the first clang of the till drawer firing open and the money going in sounded, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I cannot deny I have been extremely lucky - the generosity of people around me has been astounding and, with their help, I've managed to put together a system that really works; and one that would have cost potentially over £1000 had I tried to buy something like it brand new. In this instance, with all the little bits and pieces I had to buy and the donations of beer in return for services rendered, this system has actually cost less than the quote for repairing my original till.

But even if you fancy having a go at it for yourself from scratch, it's not necessarily expensive. The software is free, and on Ebay the monitor is circa £150, an appropriate receipt printer will cost you from £50 depending on age and condition, and a reasonable specification refurbished PC unit will cost from £100. Add any necessary cables, peripherals such as keyboards and mice, and the possibility of needing to bribe some tech-savvy customers to configure your database, and you can potentially build your own touch-screen EPoS system for under £400 and a little bit of your time.

To me, the cost became irrelevant, for no other reason than I just enjoyed the challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it, and I could - and I also now know far more about tills and how to fix something if it goes wrong than I ever did before.

James Deane helped me build my new till...

The biggest problem with Twitter, however, is that it doesn't give you a lot of space to write things, such as saying thank you to the many who offered help and advice when I became a bit stuck. But I would especially like to say thank you to James Deane, for his generous donation of a PC and his personal time in putting together the application for me, to Patrick Drago for suggesting the Open Bravo software and offering advice when things were a bit confusing, and to John Clamp, who donated the receipt printer.

A little word of warning...

The prices quoted above are just what I've found by having a quick look around Ebay; you may better them from elsewhere or have stuff sitting around you can use, or you might find prices higher in some places.

What my little plan above doesn't include, but I would highly recommend, is that you also purchase an external hard drive and an uninterruptable power supply. The hard drive is for making regular back-ups of your database to protect against any unfortunate crashes, and a small UPS device will prevent your till switching off in the event of a power failure. Each will cost you from around £50.

Finally, if you build it yourself you'll probably feel a great sense of satisfaction. I know I did. But remember, it won't be supported by the professionals in the industry, so should you need their help in the future it could prove pricey.