Prothes Barai
Founder & Engineer, PSBM Labs
A point-of-sale system looks simple from the customer side of the counter — scan, total, pay, print. Underneath, it has to handle inventory, staff accounts, discounts, refunds, and — critically for many shops here — patchy internet. Here's what actually goes into building one that holds up.
Core modules every POS needs
- Inventory management — stock levels that update automatically with every sale, with low-stock alerts before a shelf actually runs empty.
- Sales and billing — fast checkout flows, barcode scanning, and support for discounts, taxes, and split payments.
- Staff accounts and permissions — cashiers shouldn't have the same access as the shop owner.
- Reporting — daily sales summaries, best-selling items, and profit margins the owner can actually check without asking a developer.
Offline-first is not optional
Internet connectivity in many retail locations across Bangladesh is inconsistent, especially outside Dhaka. A POS that stops working the moment wifi drops is a POS that will get abandoned within a week. We build sales flows to work fully offline, queuing transactions locally and syncing to the server the moment connectivity returns.
Local payment support
A POS built for the Bangladeshi market needs bKash and Nagad support alongside cash, not as an afterthought. Reconciling mobile financial service payments against daily sales reports is one of the more fiddly parts of the build, and it's worth getting right the first time.
Hardware considerations
Thermal receipt printers, barcode scanners, and cash drawers all need driver-level integration that a generic web app doesn't handle out of the box. We test against the actual hardware a shop owner will use, not just a browser on a laptop.
What owners actually care about
Past the feature list, what matters most to a shop owner is: does it make closing the till faster, and does it tell them, without digging, whether the shop made money today. Every screen we design starts from that question.