POS: items, product groups & options (add-on)

With the “POS” add-on (VidiPOS) you maintain everything your till sells in the back office: items, product groups, courses, options and quick notes. The POS app for tablet and phone follows in the next stage, and signing with a TSE under the German fiscal till regulation after that. Whatever you create now is taken over unchanged by the app at its first sync. Without the add-on, the pages under POS lead to an info page.

Who may do what is set in the role editor under Staff → Roles (groups “POS · …”): viewing and changing items depend on the permission POS: item management (view or edit); changing courses also requires POS: manage courses. The owner may always do everything.

Items

Under POS → Items you see all POS items with preview tile, price, tax rates, stock, favourite star and active switch. Filter by product group, status or search term (PLU, name, short name). Clicking the star makes an item a favourite — it then appears at the top of the till. The active switch takes an item off sale without deleting it.

In the form you set: product group, PLU (optional, unique), name in German and English, the short name for receipt and tile (at most 25 characters, with counter), unit and order. The price is always gross, as on the menu. For items with variants (beer 0.3 l / 0.5 l) choose “No own price” — the price then comes from an option that replaces the price. Items normally take their eat-in and takeaway tax rates from their product group; only exceptions get their own rates.

Further switches: misc item (staff enter name and price), disbursement (pass-through item at 0 %), print on the kitchen/bar ticket, track stock with quantity and sold out. At stock 0 an item is automatically sold out; restocking lifts that again. If you change the stock in the form, VidiPOS books only the difference to the figure shown when you opened the page — anything the till sold in the meantime stays deducted. Enter allergens and additives as short entries separated by commas. Under Option groups you assign the questions and use the arrows to put them in the order the till asks them. The ticks under Visible on these registers hide an item on individual registers.

Appearance: every item appears as a colour tile or a photo tile. Without its own colour, the product group’s colour applies. Upload images as JPG, PNG or WebP up to 2 MB; they are resized and saved again. If an image was created with artificial intelligence, tick Image is AI-generated: the list, the tile and later the till then visibly show “AI image” (labelling duty under Art. 50 of the EU AI Act).

Import from menu turns your menu categories into product groups and the dishes into items. You can repeat it: items imported before get their name and price again, anything you maintained for the till is kept. New product groups start with your standard tax rate — check the rates afterwards (food usually 7 %, drinks 19 %). With CSV export and CSV import you edit many items in a spreadsheet; if a row contains an error, nothing is saved and the page names the row and field. Using the ticks on the left and Change selection you set a price for many items at once, change it by a percentage or set the tax rates.

Log: every change to name, price, tax rates, active status, stock and image is recorded with time and person, as the German GoBD rules require for the master data of a till. You find an item’s history in the tab with the clock symbol; entries cannot be changed.

Product groups

Product groups form the tabs of the till and carry what many items share: the eat-in and takeaway tax rates, the station for the production ticket (kitchen, bar, counter, pastry or none — which printer prints a station per area is described under printers per area), the default course, colour, revenue account and cost centre for accounting and the switch for misc items. Main groups such as “food” and “drinks” combine groups for reports and DATEV. A product group that has items cannot be deleted — deactivate it instead.

Production tickets on group and item

Under Production tickets you choose on the super group (dialog on the product group page), the product group and the item which station gets which ticket: per station single, grouped or complete ticket, several at once as well (e.g. “Kitchen · single ticket” and “Pass · complete ticket”). The most specific level with a choice applies — item before product group before super group; without a tick the level inherits, and the form shows below what applies then (“inherited from product group Mains: Kitchen · grouped ticket”). An item with its own rule needs nothing on the group; a product group without its own choice takes the super group's. Printing only happens when “production ticket” is on for the item and the product group. If you choose exactly one of the four previous stations on a product group, the group also keeps this station for older register apps. A deactivated station appears only when it is chosen, with the note that it does not print. All rules at a glance: Ticket types and rules; stations, layout and test print: Stations.

Courses

Under Courses you create named courses (starter, main, dessert …) and set their order. “Immediately / no course” is built in. A course that appears in closed transactions is kept for record-keeping and can only be deactivated. If open orders carry the course, deleting it requires a replacement course; the open lines are then moved and this is noted in the journal.

Options

Option groups are the questions the till asks: side, doneness, toppings, size. For each group you set whether it is required and how many options may be chosen. An option has no price, a surcharge, or it replaces the price (variants). An option can trigger a follow-up group — “steak” then asks for the doneness —, at most five levels deep and without loops. The preview “How the till asks” shows, for a sample item, exactly the order of the questions with follow-up groups and price effect.

Price reduction: a surcharge may also be negative (a price reduction) — with the price type “Surcharge” enter, for example, -2.00 (the typographic minus “−” works too), say for a small portion or “no side”. Allowed are −999.99 to 999.99; a price that replaces the item price always stays positive. The till shows the option as “small portion −2.00”, back-office lists and the journal as “− 2,00 €”. A price reduction is booked as a line discount with the option name as its reason: the line keeps the item price (plus positive surcharges), below it the slip and the receipt show the option name and the discount, and the line amount is that much lower — a tarte flambée at €9.90 with “small portion” shows €9.90, below it “small portion (−€2.00)”, line €7.90. Two portions are €19.80 with a €4.00 line discount. The till calculates the tax from the amount after the discount; a discount on the whole receipt is spread over this rest, and in the register data (DSFinV-K) the reduction appears as a discount, not as a negative sub-item. The price after the reduction is never below 0: an option that would push the price below 0 is locked on the till (“Price would be negative”) — so only add price reductions to items whose price is high enough.

Quick notes

Quick notes are ready-made notes for the kitchen (“no onions”, “sauce on the side”) that staff attach to a line with one tap. Without a product group they appear everywhere, with a product group only there. Registers, devices and the journal are described in the chapter POS: registers, devices & journal.

Discount and void reasons

Under POS → Items → Reasons you set the reasons staff pick with one tap — in three types: discount and price change (e.g. “regular guest”, “staff”, “complaint”), void of a line (e.g. “booked by mistake”, “guest declined”, “not available”) and void of a receipt. For each reason you maintain the text, optionally an English text (the till shows it when the device is set to English), the order (arrows up and down) and whether it is offered on the till. A hidden reason stays saved and can be switched on again later; the type of a reason is fixed.

On the till the reasons appear as a choice in the discount, price and void panels. “Other” with a free text always remains available in case no fixed reason fits. As long as you have entered nothing for a type, the till shows its standard list (void of a line: booked by mistake, guest declined, change, complaint, other; void of a receipt: booked wrongly, guest complaint, duplicate, other) or, for a discount, the free text field. The list reaches the devices with the item sync. The journal stores the chosen reason as text — exactly as it read when booked; later changes or deleting a reason do not change transactions already booked. Reading and changing depend, as for quick notes, on the permission POS: item management.