Electronics & Appliances POS: Serial Numbers, Warranty and Instalments

An electronics shop sells few items for a lot of money, and each one leaves with a serial number and a warranty. That changes what the software has to be good at. Speed at the counter matters less than being able to answer, two years later, "which fridge was this, when did you buy it, and is it covered?"

The Electronics & appliances preset is built around those two records.

What the electronics preset switches on

• Serial / IMEI — each unit tracked individually.
• Warranty — cover recorded at the sale, claims tracked against it.

Credit sales are on, because appliances go out on instalments and arrangements more than most retail does, and the product screen is a search box.

The serial is the record

Serial numbers are entered when the delivery arrives — off the cartons, one per line — and the cashier picks from what is actually in stock at the point of sale. The unit is then linked to that bill permanently.

This is the thing that makes a warranty claim answerable. Somebody arrives with an AC and a serial number; you can find the sale, the date, the customer, and whether the cover is still running. Without the link, you are searching a paper file for a receipt the customer has lost.

A unit that has been sold cannot be flipped back to in-stock by re-typing its number. That protects the bill it went out on.

Warranty: a date, not a duration

You record the cover period at the sale, and each product can carry its own usual period so it fills in automatically — 12 months for one line, 24 for another, and none at all for accessories.

The card the customer takes away states the exact date the cover ends. The month arithmetic is careful about short months: one month from 31 January is 28 February, not 3 March. That sounds like a detail until it is the difference between honouring a claim and refusing one that was actually inside the cover — on a date that looked entirely correct.

A claim is opened as a repair job with a warranty flag: no charge, the same received → ready → delivered flow, and a snapshot of the serial and bill number so the history survives.

Big-ticket credit, with a limit

Appliances go out on credit. Each customer has a ledger and, optionally, a credit limit that the till enforces. Worth knowing: a limit of zero means no limit, not "no credit" — set a number when you want a cap.

A bill can be settled with more than one tender, so half cash and half card is recorded as two legs rather than filed under one method. That matters at the end of the day: the cash drawer count is computed from the cash leg only, so a split sale does not make the till read over or short.

Costing that survives a price correction

Margins on appliances are thin enough that getting cost wrong changes the answer. GOF POS values stock on a weighted average cost that only a goods receipt can move — not the purchase price field on the product, which is freely editable. Correcting a typo in a price does not rewrite last month's profit.

Freight is included properly, too: shipping on a purchase is spread across the lines by value, so a container's delivery cost lands in the unit cost where it belongs instead of disappearing into a total.

Accessories are not appliances

Extension leads, remotes and cables carry no serial and no warranty. Both can be switched off per product, so the till stops asking on the lines where the question makes no sense — while the fridges and LEDs are still tracked.

Getting started

Setup takes about ten minutes. When you sign up you pick Electronics & appliances as your business type, and GOF POS switches on the features above for you — no configuration screens to hunt through, no consultant. If something in the preset does not suit you, every switch is yours to change afterwards in Settings → Business type.

The app runs on Windows, macOS and Linux for the counter, and on Android and iOS for stock checks and quick sales on the move. The desktop till keeps working when the internet does not, and syncs when it comes back.

See pricing or download GOF POS and try it on a real day's trading.