Register · Selling
The counter keeps taking money when the line goes down.
Cards on your own Stripe account, cash in a drawer, tips, returns and parked sales — on one screen, against one ledger, on whatever hardware you already have.
What you get
Card payments run through a paired Stripe reader; when the reader is out, the same sale can be keyed into Stripe's own card form on the till instead.
The connection drops and the register carries on selling — each sale queues locally with its own reference and replays exactly once when the line returns.
Totals are worked out on the server from the lines, in integer cents against tax rates in basis points. A price typed on a till is never the price the books believe.
The drawer opens with a counted float, can be counted mid-shift, and closes with a Z-read — so over-and-short is a number rather than an argument.
Receipts print, email or text; a return walks back out through the same ledger it came in on.
How it runs
A busy Saturday, start to finish.
- 1
A cashier signs in with a PIN and opens the till with its counted float.
- 2
Items are scanned or tapped; options and any age check prompt where the catalogue says they should.
- 3
The customer taps a card on the reader, adds a tip on its screen, and takes a printed or texted receipt.
- 4
The card line goes out mid-afternoon; the till keeps selling offline and replays its queue when the connection comes back.
- 5
At close the drawer is counted, the Z-read is filed, and the day's takings are already on the books.
The questions people ask
- What happens to a sale rung up while we were offline?
- It is queued on the till under its own reference and replayed when the connection returns. The reference is what makes a retry safe — a half-finished flush is the ordinary case, not the unlucky one — so the sale lands once and only once.
- Can we take a card with no reader, or a card that will not read?
- Yes. The same sale can be paid through Stripe's own card form on the till's screen, which is what a dead reader or a damaged stripe needs. The number is typed into Stripe, never into us, and never into a note.
- What hardware does it need?
- The register is a web page, so any till, tablet or laptop with a browser runs it. Receipt printers and cash drawers connect through QZ Tray; card payments use a Stripe Terminal reader on your own Stripe account.
- Can one person work two registers, or two locations?
- Registers are their own tills with their own drawers and their own close, under one catalogue and one set of books. A location keeps its own timezone, so close-of-day ends when that day ends.
Start with Register switched on.
Every module is part of the same trial — turn on what you need, leave the rest off, and your data exports on any day of it.