CLOUD - Back Office Basics and Report Guide

The POS system is a very powerful tool for your business. Behind the POS system is a comprehensive set of reports and features that allows you to analyse your business and manage the POS system. This document will take you through all the concepts of the Back Office (or Back of House) component of the system.

A LOGIN is a combination of a login (or username) and password. This is to allow access only to those people who are allowed to have access to your reports. This is a very important security issue. As iPOS can be connected to the Internet, your LOGIN details will protect your system.

Your Login is the same as it appears on your button in the POS system. Your Password should be kept secret, changed regularly and have a combination of letters and numbers.

Open your browser (Chrome, Edge)

iPOS should be set to the Home Page and the Point of Sale options as well as the Login and Password field should appear on the screen.

Click in the Login field.

Enter your Login, press Tab

Enter your Password

Click the Login button

If you get it wrong the system will allow 3 attempts.

Do not panic if you get it wrong 3 times. Just close Internet Explorer and try again. Just make sure you closed all Internet Explorer windows.

Each time you open Internet Explorer you get 3 attempts.

The login and password are not case sensitive, but if you have used a combination letters and numbers then the Num Lock may be turned off which is sending direction arrows instead of numbers. Check that the Num Lock light on your keyboard is on.

The system will, on a regular basis, ask you to change your password. When you do this only your password will change the Login name will stay the same.

Do not share your login details with others, this is a security risk. If you want others to have access then you can create a separate login and password for them to use.

Internet Explorer will offer to remember login and passwords for you. We recommend that you do not use this feature as it will render the security useless in a shared office environment.

As a further security measure iPOS will time out your Back Office session after a period of time, if you do not continue to use it. This is why you may be asked to login again if you leave the system idle and then try to run a report.

Once you have successfully logged in, the POS Menu will always be displayed. Here is a quick description of the Main features of this page.

Across the top of the Page the system will display the name of the page (middle large font), the name of the store (top right corner), the version and date (lower right).

Clicking on POSItalic Text (top left) will always return you to this page.

The far left column is the Sidebar Menu. The Sidebar Menu has a list of links that will change the way the system behaves. For example: adding Staff or removing a product you no longer want to sell.

iPOS has been designed so that you don’t need to print a report at all. The system will store and can report on anything today, tomorrow, 6 months or 3 years from now. Everything is date based.

The actual number of and position of the reports may change in the Menu with future updates. What will not change is how to generate a report and what you can do with it.

All reports in the system are calculated when they are asked for. This means that changes in the data (such as more sales) will be reflected each time you ask for the report. A good way to see this behavior is to run a Sales Report like a Daily Summary for today, wait a couple of minutes (make some more sales) and click the Refresh button in Internet Explorer. This will make the system recalculate the report and include any new sales made in between the two reports.

Many reports also have hyperlinks. All of iPOS is effectively a web page. One of the features of web pages is that they can be linked in many ways to each other. (This is why it is called a ‘web’, since the links do not have to be ordered and they can jump from any page to any page). Hyperlinks are used on Reports in IPOS to indicate that more information is available. This is normally a “drill-down” process (into more detail) but it could also be a “drill across” (into related data).

A Hyperlink can be spotted on a report by the underline. Also when you move your mouse over the hyperlink it will change to a pointing hand. Clicking on the hyperlink will start the calculation of that report. You can return to the current report by clicking on the Back button in Internet Explorer. (When clicking Back, the report is not recalculated; your computer picks up the copy it had before).

Reports in iPOS have been designed so that they are compatible for Word and Excel. Reports can be cut & pasted into either of these programs and they will retain their formatting and hyperlinks.

At some time you will want to print the reports. Internet Explorer does the printing, not iPOS so you need to be aware of how Internet Explorer handles printing.

Firstly Internet Explorer will use your default printer settings. Where possible we have designed Reports to be best printed in Portrait but not every report can fit that way. If a report needs to be printed landscape you will need to change the Print Options in Internet Explorer, iPOS cannot tell Internet Explorer which way to print the report.

Select File | Page Setup.

Change the Orientation to Landscape

Click OK.

Once you have printed the report, don’t forget to change it back to Portrait otherwise the next report will be in landscape as well.

When you do print a report, it may look slightly different to the format on the screen. This is because the screen is a different width to the printed page. iPOS has built-in report rules to change column widths to fit.

To view any of these reports:

1. Choose which one best suits your needs and select it from the lists from the “Point of Sale” menu once you have logged on;

2. Select the date or date range as requested along with any other filters that you may require (Tip: the date will default to today’s date)

3. Click “Calculate Report” to view your results;

4. Should you need to print the report, simply select “Print” from the “File Menu”.

A very powerful feature is that you can run multiple copies of Internet Explorer on the same computer and run multiple reports at the same time. You can use this feature to run and compare reports for different periods.