Point of Sales and Inventory Management System for FAIRDEAL

Abstract

FAIRDEAL is a dealer in garments where apparels are imported and sold according customer requirements. Currently, at FAIRDEAL the sales, purchases, sales returns and exchange of items are done manually by issuing hand written bills where there is a tendency in losing these receipts by the customer and by FAIRDEAL, resulting in, unable to trace past transactions. This process is also time consuming where the customers need to wait until their billing turn, which leads to losing customers, where customers are so valuable in this type of business. This process is even worse during festive seasons where FAIRDEAL requires, maintaining a sequential incremental invoice number on sold items. At the end of each day, the manager at FAIRDEAL totals the cash in hand referring all the transaction bills issued, which is a tedious task. To address this problem, this Point of Sales and Inventory Management System is proposed, which is easy to use, multi user, LAN based system having more than one sales terminal, but still generating a sequential invoice number and issues a bill to each customer using a POS printer. Histories of transactions are recorded so that at any given time they could be referred. Further to reduce the delay during sales, bar coding is used, where an item is identified by scanning it with a barcode scanner, rather than typing the item code. More advantageous features such as generating useful reports on inventory and sales that helps the management to take corrective steps to improve the business and reduce the work carried out at the sales outlet by the sales personnel and the management, not exposing critical data to unauthorized users, barcode printing and using a customer display unit to show the sales value, transferring binary data from the CPU s serial communication port to the device are also included. As I am familiar with VFP9, development language, which is used at my work place, I intended to develop this POSIMS, using this programming language which has object oriented concepts, inbuilt database supporting many inbuilt functions for database handling, report writer engine and needs less hardware resources for deployment such as a computer running on Windows 2000 is quite sufficient. With comprehensive testing, the system was completed and is currently used by the client, FAIRDEAL, where its users and the management are satisfied, as it delivered more than the manual booking system, which is user friendly, accurate and efficient.