No posting tonight
Our old cash register at the store is getting cranky -- some of the number keys don't work reliably so I went out today and got a new one. Learning how to program it tonight so this will take an hour or three.
A quick heads up -- if you are looking for a Cash Register or know someone who might be, stay the hell away from Casio.
I had purchased a mid-line Casio register a few weeks ago but had been running into major issues with it. I thought that it would be a good register as it offered programming directly from a PC and it also used Compact Flash cards for saving and restoring data.
The programming interface is through a Serial port only, the User Interface for the computer application is horrid -- straight out of Windows 3.11 and the Compact Flash data storage is, at my most charitable, next to worthless as the file format is ASCII strings but unusable by standard applications. This is the most recent model that Casio makes but it has the look and feel of something fifteen years old. What really gets my goat is that they charged extra for the application
AND for the programmers manual $120 and $35 respectively. Needless to say, I am not buying another Casio product in the future...
The unit I picked up today was made by Sharp. Connects to the PC via USB port, it registers on your PC as an external device. The programming interface is nice and easy and it uses an SD card to archive up to one year of your data. File format? Either CSV or Quicken/QuickBooks -- your choice...
Want to buy a cash register, buy a Sharp XE-A505 - best couple hundred you will ever spend...
Posted by DaveH at June 26, 2009 9:16 PM