I wonder if you can rent them? I doubt it but it would be worth looking into. *flings himself into a bunker before someone asks him to do it.*

I know better than to try to get involved in the Art Show dealings. Having seen what goes into MFF’s Art Show software, that’s magnitudes of complexity that I don’t EVEN want to get into.

Unfortunately, looking at the Dell POS site, the cheapest complete system they sell is around $2,200. We’d need four of those, and if I presented that number to Kage, the poor guy would have a heart attack.

This is going to get a bit involved, but bear with me 🙂 Right now we’re giving out receipt books that each have 50 triplicate sets of receipts, numbered XX00-XX49 or XX50-XX99, where XX is a number from 01 to 80 corresponding to the 80 seats in the Alley. Up until now our cashiers have been manually entering the receipt number at the beginning of each transaction, remembering to enter the number probably 95% of the time (this helps later when trying to match up receipts: what got paid for, what the artist got back, etc.).

The idea I’m kicking around is printing new receipt books (which we have to anyway, since currently we only have books from 00 to 99, which won’t work if we go to 120 seats). Each receipt would have a bar code corresponding to the receipt number, but ideally the POS software would be able to pick out the first few digits of the receipt number as the artist number (or, for tracking purposes, the “department” number). At the end of the day, then, we could then run off a report by department that would tell us exactly how much to pay each artist, along with an itemized list of what was paid for for each artist.

Now we need to try to sort through the POS software to see what can best meet our needs, and how we can get the lowest price for the software and hardware. Quickbooks would be ideal, though I note that if you use multiple terminals networked together you need a unique copy of the software for each terminal – ouch! That drives the price up a bit. We’ll see what I can find after more research, though 🙂

I WILL get around to a post-con report, eventually…

And screw Con Store taking Artist’s Alley receipts… Artist’s Alley needs to take Con Store Receipts!

I promise not to crack jokes beyond this comment on the term “Dell POS System” 🙂