A POS system (point of sale, or till system) records sales in a physical shop or hospitality venue: checkout, payments, receipts and often inventory and revenue reporting too. Modern POS systems such as Lightspeed run in the cloud and can be connected to your webshop and accounting.
The POS system in practice
For shops that also run a webshop, the POS system is one of the three places where inventory and revenue live — alongside the webshop and the accounting system. Without integrations those three drift apart: items that still look available online while the shop just sold them, and revenue that gets transferred over by hand.
Once connected, it becomes one whole: every receipt and webshop order automatically ends up in the administration and inventory stays accurate across all channels. How that works for Lightspeed is explained in Connecting Lightspeed to Exact Online.
Related terms
- WMS — A WMS (Warehouse Management System) is software that controls warehouse processes: stock locations, order picking, receiving and shipping.
- ERP — An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system) is a single system that brings together a company's core administration: finance, purchasing, inventory, orders and often projects or production too.
- API integration — An API integration is a connection between two software systems that automatically exchange data via their APIs — for example orders from a webshop to the accounting system, or placements from an ATS to invoicing.