Introduction to Cin7 Core POS

Introduction to Cin7 Core POS

Point-of-sale (POS) systems allow merchants to sell their stock from their store, retail, or any other location. Cin7 Core syncs your product catalog, stock levels, and sale orders between your POS stores and your main inventory. Organize staff, track sales volume, make sales from any device, and more with Cin7 Core POS cloud-based suite of features.

Cin7 Core POS is divided between stores, outlets, and registers. Each store can have its own catalog, settings, users, and logs, and is tied to a location in Cin7 Core. Stores can have one or more outlets, and outlets can have one or more registers.

Cin7 Core POS is an add-on to the base subscription. Purchasing the add-on will unlock a POS store, outlet, and register. Additional POS registers can be purchased to add to the subscription, which can all belong to one store or store, or be distributed among multiple stores.

Note: Legacy subscribers whose account dates from before 1st September 2023 will have no change to their current functionality of store, outlet, and register numbers.

Managers can set up and manage Cin7 Core POS from Cin7 Core web portal - this is where you can configure settings, set up outlets and registers, manage the product catalog, and invite staff members as users.

Cin7 Core POS application is where your staff can process sales, exchanges, and returns, as well as add customer records, generate gift cards, check product availability, order stock to the POS location, transfer stock between locations, and more. POS users with Manager or Admin role can also view reports such as Sales Summary, Product Performance, and Store Credit Reports.

Connect a supported printer to the POS device to print receipts and scan barcodes by connecting a scanner, or using the mobile camera of the device. Cin7 Core also supports multiple payment platforms to process your POS transactions. Scanners and printer configuration takes place via the Cin7 Core POS application, while payment processors require access to both the web portal and the POS application.


Add Cin7 Core POS to your subscription

Cin7 Core POS is an add-on to the base subscription. Purchasing the add-on will unlock a POS store, outlet, and register. Additional POS registers can be purchased to add to the subscription, which can all belong to one store or store, or be distributed among multiple stores. You can add more POS registers from the My subscription page of your account.

Note: Legacy subscribers whose account dates from before 1st September 2023 will have no change to their current functionality of store, outlet, and register numbers.

Setting up Cin7 Core POS

Set up and manage Cin7 Core POS from Cin7 Core. This is where you can configure settings, set up outlets and registers, manage the product catalog, and invite staff members as users.

Learn more about Setting up Cin7 Core POS.


Customizable settings

Configure POS store settings to reflect your sales process. This includes when sales should be synced from POS to Cin7 Core (when created vs when paid), whether to consolidate orders, which default price tiers and taxes should be applied, allowing selling of out of stock products, and more. These settings also allow you to customize how the POS register will look to your users.

Learn more about Customizable settings.


Account security settings

Each POS store starts with a default user password that is given to users invited to Cin7 Core POS. When they access POS for the first time, they will be prompted to reset their password to their own unique one. From this point, you can choose to have users log in via password or via PIN. Other account security settings include enabling screen auto-lock and setting a 'reply to' business email for sending sale documents to customers.

Learn more about POS account security.


Payments and cash

POS stores that deal with cash transactions have multiple cash accounts to keep track of; petty cash, till discrepancies, cash float, and more. Map each of these to accounts in your chart of accounts for accurate accounting. These accounts can be mapped at the store, outlet, and register level for even higher levels of transparency. Similarly, payment methods (cash, card, store credits) can be mapped to different bank accounts to clearly record revenue.

You can connect the following payment processors and hardware with your POS store. Follow the links for detailed instructions on how to set up each payment processor and accept payments.

Stores, outlets, and registers

Cin7 Core POS is divided between stores, outlets, and registers. Each store can have its own catalog, settings, users, and logs, and is tied to a location in Cin7 Core. Stores can have one or more outlets, and outlets can have one or more registers.

Cin7 Core POS is an add-on to the base subscription. Purchasing the add-on will unlock a POS store, outlet, and register. Additional POS registers can be purchased to add to the subscription, which can all belong to one store or store, or be distributed among multiple stores.

Note: Legacy subscribers whose account dates from before 1st September 2023 will have no change to their current functionality of store, outlet, and register numbers.

At the store level, you can configure which products are listed for sale, which users are invited and what permissions they have, the default settings (UI, tax rates, account mapping).

At the outlet level, you can set outlet-level SKUs, set outlet level settings (UI, tax rates, account mapping). Outlet-level settings take priority over store-level settings.

At the register level, you can set even more specific register-level settings (UI, tax rates, account mapping). Register-level settings take priority over outlet-level and store-level settings.

Learn more about outlets and registers.

Users and user permissions

Users must be invited to your POS store before they can log in and sell your products. Users can be invited either from Cin7 Core web portal or from the POS application itself. User permissions can only be configured from Cin7 Core web portal, and any user invited via the application will have all permissions disabled by default. Users can have access to all outlets, or can be limited to selected outlets only. The available user roles are Cashier, Manager, and Administrator - managers have access to reports for their assigned outlets, while administrators can access reports from any outlet of a store. All other permissions can be freely enabled or disabled for any user, regardless or role.

Learn more about users and user permissions.

Product catalog

Your product catalog is what your POS users can see on the register for customers to buy. Products in your inventory must be listed on your POS store before they can be sold to customers through the POS interface. Products must already be created in Cin7 Core before they can be listed, and product details like descriptions, images, and pricing updated in Cin7 Core will by updated automatically in POS. Delisting a product from the catalog will make it unavailable for sale. You can list products individually for precision, or in bulk to save time.

Learn more about listing a product catalog.


Loyalty program

Loyalty programs offer discounts and incentives to your most enthusiastic customers. This encourages more purchases, customer retention, and offers insight into customer demographics and purchasing patterns.

Cin7 Core POS offers a simple, easy-to-use loyalty program where your customers earn dollars to spend in your store every time they make a purchase. The amount of loyalty earned per dollar spent is customizable - a default loyalty ratio applied to all products which can be edited any time, but custom loyalty point earnings can be applied to individual products. Loyalty points can then be redeemed as credit against future sales.

As well as the free loyalty program offered by default with all Cin7 Core POS subscriptions, we also offer integration with LoyaltyLion, another loyalty program which offers more options for deals and perks.

Learn more about loyalty programs.


Using Cin7 Core POS

Once the basics have been set up from the Cin7 Core web portal, your users can start using Cin7 Core POS to process sales for your customers from any device. A dedicated application can be downloaded from the Apple Store or Google Play store for tablets and smartphones, but you can still access Cin7 Core POS through a regular web browser if you need to.

Learn more about accessing the POS store.


Cash register management

Open and close a register shift each business day to maintain accurate reporting and make it easy to balance the cash drawer at the end of the day. Opening or closing a register will generate an opening/closing report, which can be saved as a PDF or printed.

Learn more about opening the cash register and cash management.


Connect supported hardware

Supported hardware can be connected to your Cin7 Core POS device to improve your sales experience.

Barcode scanners must be attached to the device in order to scan items, alternatively you can search for items manually and enter them. Cin7 Core also allows barcode scanning via the mobile device camera.

Printers can be connected to print receipts and product labels.

Learn more about connecting barcode scanners and printers.


Customer-facing display can be connected to fulfill regulations requiring that the consumer should be able to clearly see the details of the price being charged for each item, including any surcharges and discounts, while processing a sale order at a POS terminal. Connecting a display to your mobile device while using POS application will show customer-facing information automatically and both Android and iOS devices.

Learn more about connecting a customer-facing display from POS web.


Making sales

Processing sales for your customers is the primary feature of Cin7 Core POS. Either via web or via the application on your mobile device, you can ring up sales, process exchanges and returns, process on-account and lay-by sales, generate gift cards for your customers, and even have customers collect orders at your POS location that are processed through Cin7 Core web. Additionally, you can set up Quick Keys templates for your registers so that your users can find popular items quickly.

Learn more about selling in POS.


Managing stock

Many stock management actions can be carried out directly from your POS application. This includes creating stock transfer orders from one location to another, performing stocktake at an outlet to check for discrepancies, and raising purchase orders directly from the POS app to order new stock from suppliers or from other locations of your business.

Learn more about ordering products, stock transfers, and stocktakes in POS.


Customers

Existing Cin7 Core customers can be viewed, added, and modified from the POS application. Users can view customer records, balance, loyalty points and store credits from the POS application.

Sales can be associated to a new or existing customer, or alternatively a default customer POS Walk-In can be used for sales without entering customer information. Some sale features such as layby sales, on account sales, and sales quotes are only available when a sale has an associated customer.

Adding a customer to a sale will allow you to select if the customer contact is opted-in or opted-out of marketing communications. This information will be shared with Cin7 Core web portal and can be integrated with CRMs such as HubSpot.

Learn more about customers.


Reports

There are nine reports available in Cin7 Core POS, including Sales Summary, Product Performance and Inventory (Low on stock and on hand), and more. Generally, reports can be emailed, exported into another format (usually PDF or CSV) and saved on your computer, saved as a new report, and printed. Cashier users can't view reports at all, manager users can view reports for their assigned POS outlets, while administrators can view reports for any outlet.

Learn more about available reports.

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