EPOS does not like special characters ...

[actinico]

Hello
It seems that EPOS is willing to read barcodes like '5562187-89' with a dash, but when it comes to look-up or within sales if you read a barcode or input it manually as the example above, it will not find it!

Since I also tried manually to input it and I noticed that EPOS has special charatcers disabled, what can we do?

Unfortunately is not our choice, as we have items barcoded by the manufacturers with special characters!

I do understand and agree that special characters should not be in a barcode, but as I mentioned we have 'many' items barcoded by the manufactures with special characters and they are already input in!


This has to be solved at once or we will have to manually replace hundreds of codes because of it.


The power of Microsoft Access

[Mark Evenden]

Mate, body language is IMO important when seeking advice and co-operation.

Yours is poor.

[actinico]

Mate, body language is IMO important when seeking advice and co-operation.

Yours is poor.

I do agree and my body language follows EPOS behaviour, but being a 'paying' customer and our money was perfectly fine I would expect a functioning program and I mean 'not perfect' as there is no one programme that is perfect, but programmes that work generally fine do exist.

So, mine is not a request of help or cooperation, but merely a request to 'fix' this clearly unstable program.

I do use also Dreamweaver/Firworks/Flash/Photoshop, etc. (I am not rich, but I have slowly invested my earned cash during the past 10 years) and they generally work fine and I only had a few gliches 'in years'. So, I do know how programs work, when they work fine, because I generally 'smile' while using them.
Unfortunately EPOS does not make me smile yet.

The obvious tasks seem to work fine and as soon as you need a bit more than a standard database, EPOS start to loose beats.

Also, this 'body language' has been largely caused by EPOS (the programme) continually stepping in our work and making a simple task more difficult.

I wish I have never chosen it in the first place. I did it only because of Actinic's name (truting it) and I did not 'really' check what was going on.

Then after I purchased it and with problems coming out all of the time (for problems I mean strange programme behaviour) I found out that actinic just purchased Checkout and named it EPOS.

I am only able to get on becauseI use Computers since they wer born and have learned to foul a Program and make it do what I need to do.

All comes to the fact that it was put on the market without a proper testing.
Funnily enough Actinic's manager wrote an article on .NET magazine (two / three months ago) about Companies that just throw programmes on the market without proper testing, just what Actinic did with EPOS!

The only good thing is that Actinic is a nice Conpany and I am sure they will solve all problems to their best. It is just that 'we are' the tested customers, without our consent.

Since I am barcoding everything, once every 50/100 items I get a problem with EPOS not being able to handle this or that. That is why in this case.

I have all the rights to be like it, at present - EPOS is creating grief and I cannot go back after a few weeks of work. But once it is done, I may.

..and it is also not Tracey or James fault if EPOS is waht it is, theyare doing what they are told and do their best to help us.

Hope this clears things.


PS I am a person that usually gives advice every day for free!
In Electronics, Computing, etc. - that is why customers come back and our websites too are growing - must be my supposed to be bad manners!
Do not judge and give dead penalty if you do not know, the facts and most importantly the person at all

[Mark Evenden]

I also, as do many businesses offer advice daily free to both my own clients and non customers - and would not out of principle pay a monthly or annual fee for "support" because I strongly object to the practise!

That said, help is required at times, I unlike you am not computer literate, I am too old to of done any IT at school!

I initially bought V6 catalog, then 7 and now have 8 - I too like the Actinic brand so decided with out looking at any other system / software to buy EPOS. I bought a complete system, J2 etc.

It was delivered at Christmas and installed by James and Andy just over two weeks ago. We had three hours training and this has proved invaluable.

Our shop is not massive, but (I now know cos of EPOS) that we stock 4,656 lines, which came as bit of a surprise to me.

Anyway, because we are open daily we had to add the inventory as we went along, we added all the products, but didn't put in the stock level. We worked for 5pm last night to 2am, counting the stock using the inventory stock print out generated by EPOS, then today I have loaded the stock count into the till and we will go "live" with it tomorrow.

Of coarse there are some issues that have arisen, that I cant deal with. I have made a list, and will contact the telephone support tomorrow and work through the list. I thought it better to do it this way rather than waste time fiddling ( learnt this from catalog) with details whilst the build took place.

The problems I will be asking Actinic to explain are,

1/ Some of the report functions refuse to work, the error screen indicating "OVERFLOW".....this is a function I need and one of the reasons I bought the system.

2/ I cant get the PROMOTIONS tab to work, although I suspect this is something I am doing / not doing, again I get an error message

3/ Flickering screen!

4/ I cant get the printer to produce a receipt on demand, it works fine if switch to "on" for all transactions, but we don't want to use it like that (too mean)

5/ When we switch screens using the touch screen, the previously opened screens buttons are still visible.

6/ We bought the very expensive Actinic Keyboard and cant find the Esc key!

That is about it as far as issues with installation, I am hoping the latest patch will sort some if not all of it out.

I of course expect errors and teething troubles when we start to use it for transactions tomorrow, time will tell, but I do expect Actinic to be available - paid support or not as a retailer of 25 years standing and with many friends with in my industry, I can either support sales with my enthusiasm, or say nothing......


So far we are very happy with the system / software.

[wjcampbe]

Good post Mark. An excellent appraisal of how to implement a new piece of software.

[Mark Evenden]

Cheers Bill

I will post tomorrow after close of business and report how we got on!

beep, beep

[actinico]

Good post Mark. An excellent appraisal of how to implement a new piece of software.

This is the point.

It is not a new piece of software!

=============


Hope you get on well Mark, how can you input around 5,000 items in that short time? I worked flat out and i ONLY GOT 80% and I am not a slow worker at all.

You are super fast.

PS I am not a young lad myself and I did not do IT in school but I self teached it myself since 1976 - it is called self education - then learned Webmastering since 1999 (a bit late!) and use it for my business

[Mark Evenden]

Actinico - well we managed it because we had support from the manufacturers and wholesalers, with easy to access information, also there are three of us, and we worked out a pretty good system of one on the keyboard, one fetching goods from shelves and scanning and the other looking up the various codes, prices etc and relaying it to the keyboard operator. We worked continuously until the job was done..it was quite sobering to see the effect the new "toy" had on everyone, everyone got involved and that's the best way to learn....Its far from ideal, but there is no other way.


Anyway, day one of the "live" till. Have to say inwardly content as it worked well, no major problems. Didn't get around to registering the list of "ifs, buts and maybes" with phone support as the day flew by. I am pretty sure that most of our problems will be ironed out as we press buttons in the right order, if you know what I mean.

The till does seem a little slow compared to a standard cash register, delay moving from screen to screen, although no doubt that's because I have used a standard one for 25 years, not 10 hours......

We have placed the scanner poorly... this was apparent as customers placed their baskets on the wrong side as it were! so will move it tomorrow, sorted the receipt printing problem, and I do oh so like the A4 printing of x and z reports as these can be filed properly as opposed to thin strips of till roll that go all curly and you are supposed to store for 7 years!..little things, but important.

What else? well its interesting to see what the daily gross profit is in an instant - worrying when compared to the know daily costs! Although some of the reports don't work (currently), those that do are very in-depth and will really help us streamline our stock, target areas etc.

We even generated a supplier order and compared it to one done manually, the EPOS order had 15 more lines on it (about 10% of the order)

I bought a USB stick and backed up the data, couldn't open it on the J2, but it opens at home on my lap top ( will add that to the list!) It opened in note pad on the JS all EFVHYx!!22c whats that all about!...Opens in English on my lap top

We have ordered some shelf edging so we can use the print ticket facility, other than that we are pretty much done -
No doubt there is much potential with in the software that we don't have the ability to exploit, but flip side is that it is pretty forgiving / understanding on those of us who have no IT training at all.

Spent this evening updating the database with bits that only become apparent as wrong when the system is commissioned, one or two prices were wrong, a couple of tax bands were wrong ( we have four VAT bands in a pet / aquatic shop) - just made a note through the day, then when closed altered it.

Looking forward to 8am opening Tuesday now, not bad after 25 years in hum drum retail.

[James M SellerDeck]

1/ Some of the report functions refuse to work, the error screen indicating "OVERFLOW".....this is a function I need and one of the reasons I bought the system.

This can happen when one or more of your products has Pack Quantity set to 0, the quick way to check this, is go to Product File | Data sheets, and check the colum labelled 'PackQnty' that non of those are 0 or blank.

2/ I cant get the PROMOTIONS tab to work, although I suspect this is something I am doing / not doing, again I get an error message

Which promotion are you trying to set up in particular, and what error message do you get?

3/ Flickering screen!

I have reported this, so hopefully this will be fixed in an update.

4/ I cant get the printer to produce a receipt on demand, it works fine if switch to "on" for all transactions, but we don't want to use it like that (too mean)

If you go to Setup | printing, check the box for 'A4 printing on', now when you complete a sale, you will be prompted to whether you want to print a receipt or not.

5/ When we switch screens using the touch screen, the previously opened screens buttons are still visible.

This is fixed in the latest patch, which I will email you a link for.

6/ We bought the very expensive Actinic Keyboard and cant find the Esc key!

The 'Cancel' button is the same as the Esc key.

Hope that helps

James

[actinico]

The till does seem a little slow compared to a standard cash register, delay moving from screen to screen, although no doubt that's because I have used a standard one for 25 years, not 10 hours

You should do 2 things first (in windows 95 onwards):

1. check your computer graphic card
RIGHT click on your desktop (anywhere on your screen) and choose Properties
Choose the SETTINGS tab and there you should see what kind of Graphic card you have
I would say a 64Mb may not be enough and suggest you to replace it with a 128 or even 256Mb - they are cheap enough now and that 'may' solve your switching screens problem

2. you should Defragment your hard drive at least once a month
You could let it work at night after work it could take anything from 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the Hard drive is or/and how defragmented it is.
Click on start/programs/accessories/system tools - it is there

Remember to always back up your data on double copy! Before you do anything.

Hope this helps

[Mark Evenden]

Thank you James, noted.

Actinico - obliged.

[actinico]

At present I have a 64Mb on this PC and 'it is' slow - but only slightly.

I presume a 128Mb will do the job - in my case.

If what I mentioned does not help, check you RAM memory - if you have XP I would suggest you at least 256Mb (although Microsoft likes to advertise only 125Mb) - XP gets a lot of resources from your computer, especially if you have a multitasking program on (EPOS - Imaging software - etc.).