Let's talk about POSLavu…

…and what it is, and why it's some­thing you should know about.

 

Okay, well, maybe it's not some­thing that every­one should know about, but if you're part of the select group of peo­ple who are at all inter­ested in Point Of Sale or iOS, you might want to know more about it.

 

So, what is it? In a nut­shell, it's a cloud-based POS solu­tion built from the ground up to work on an iPod Touch or iPad; fully com­pli­ant with impact and ther­mal print­ers, and able to work with cash reg­is­ters and credit card read­ers. It's the whole enchi­lada for any­one who, well, sells enchi­ladas. Or cof­fee. Or elab­o­rate eight-course gourmet meals.

 

There are two rea­sons why I'm excited about it and, there­fore, writ­ing about it.

 

Firstly, it's rather unique in that you don't actu­ally need a com­puter in order to set it up, run it, or use it. Sure, it really doesn't hurt to have a PC or Mac to hand to work through the web con­fig­u­ra­tion inter­face, but it's not a nec­es­sary require­ment. All you  need is an iPad, a good, solid, well-designed wire­less net­work, and… well, that's all. It's a remark­ably robust, feature-rich solu­tion. Bet­ter yet, in a world where it's very easy to spend upwards of $17-20k on a com­mer­cial POS sys­tem, a POSLavu license starts at less than $2k — and once you add an iPad, a cash reg­is­ter, a printer, and a rudi­men­tary wire­less net­work to the mix, you're prob­a­bly look­ing at less than $3k, all done.

 

Sec­ondly, it's not a toy. It's not a com­pro­mised, cut-rate solu­tion. It's not slow, nor inef­fi­cient, nor lack­ing in any­way. It can pro­duce sophis­ti­cated reports, allow com­plete flex­i­bil­ity and cus­tomiza­tion of order­ing, and (with the next update), some pretty solid inven­tory con­trol. It runs its back end as a hosted ser­vice on POSLavu's servers, but if you want to run your whole oper­a­tion locally with­out an inter­net con­nec­tion, it's per­fectly fine with that, too.

 

When the iPad first launched, it gar­nered a lot of crit­i­cism for being an over­sized iPod — an expen­sive toy. It had — some said — lit­tle to no place in com­merce or enter­prise. Appli­ca­tions like POSLavu turn that argu­ment on its head — it's exactly the right device for the job at hand.

 

We're excited to be POSLavu dis­trib­u­tors and sup­port­ers, and you can prob­a­bly look for­ward to a lot more gush­ing post­ing about it in the months to come.