Running a shop (retail mode)

Aura isn't only for restaurants — the same system rings up customers at a shop counter. Switch a terminal to shop mode and it becomes a retail register: scan, take payment, manage the drawer, done.

25.1 Switching a terminal to shop mode

On the terminal: Settings → Store type → Shop / retail and save (Settings is manager-gated). The terminal immediately:

• Hides the hospitality surface — no Floor, Kitchen, or Tabs — leaving Sale, Orders, Checklists, Reports, Register, Customer display, and Settings.
• Simplifies the Sale screen — no order-type chips, no seats or course groupings in the cart; just items, quantities and prices.
• Merges repeat scans — scanning the same barcode three times gives one line with quantity 3.

Store type is per terminal, so a restaurant with a merch counter can run one shop-mode till next to its table-service tills on the same account.

The back office follows separately. In Back Office → Settings, set each location's business type to Retail shop. That drives reporting and setup — and when every location on the account is a shop, the back office drops the three pages a shop has no use for (Tables, Prep stations, Reservations) and speaks a shop's language: Sales and Avg basket instead of Checks and Avg check, with Active tables gone. The rule is deliberately "every location": a group running a restaurant and a shop keeps the full back office, because one manager sets up both. The two settings are independent — the location's business type never changes a till's workflow, and a till's Store type never changes the back office.

25.2 Selling at the counter

• Scan with any USB/Bluetooth barcode scanner (§5.1) or tap products on the grid; give products their barcodes and SKUs in Back Office → Menu (the importer also maps them from Lightspeed/vendor CSVs, §17). Scanning a variant SKU rings that exact variant.
• Variants. Products with sizes/colours (set up in Back Office → Menu → edit product → Variants) open a picker at the till — "Small −R10 / Large +R20" — each variant with its own SKU and price. Variants sync to terminals like the rest of the catalogue, so they work offline.
• Park a sale. Tap ⏸ Park to put the current basket aside (a customer forgot their wallet, the queue is building); resume it later from Orders → Open → Resume. Parking needs a connection.
• Layby. For a sale the customer pays off over time: attach the customer, tap Layby, take a deposit, and hand over the goods only at the end. Every installment is taken like a normal payment (cash or card) and counts toward that register's cash-up. Orders → Laybys lists every open layby with its balance; the final payment settles the sale automatically. Installments can never exceed the balance.
• Take payment exactly as in §9 — cash with quick-tender and change, Yoco card, SnapScan/Zapper QR, gift cards, store credit, or on-account (house accounts, §15).
• Receipts print, WhatsApp, or email as usual; returns/refunds work from the Orders tab (§10) — and a manager can refund to store credit instead of cash, keeping the money in the shop.
• Customers and loyalty attach at the register the same way (§5.2); points accrue on every sale.

25.3 Store credit

Each customer carries a store-credit balance: managers add or deduct credit in Back Office → Customers (with a reason — every change is audited), refunds can be issued to credit instead of cash, and the till redeems it as a tender when the customer is attached to the sale. Store credit is separate from gift cards (which are anonymous, code-based) and from loyalty points.

25.4 The drawer and the day

The Register screen (§11) is the heart of shop mode: open with a float, record paid in/out, no-sale with a manager PIN, count the drawer by denomination at close, and get the Z-report variance. Managers watch every register and closure in Back Office → Registers. Layby installments always count toward the register that took them — even when the layby settles weeks later on another till.

25.5 Stock

• Back Office → Inventory: on-hand levels with stock value, reorder points with low-stock alerts, stock counts (enter what you counted; Aura writes the adjustments and flags the variance), wastage/damage logging, plus suppliers and purchase orders with receiving (§17). Reorder low stock proposes purchase orders grouped by each product's supplier, quantities prefilled.
• Transfers between branches: create a transfer, Send (stock leaves the source immediately), Receive at the destination — receive short and the difference is recorded as shrinkage-in-transit.
• Barcode labels: print A4 label sheets (name, price, Code 128 barcode) for any products or variants from Back Office → Menu.

25.6 Know your shop (analytics)

Back Office → Reports answers the retail questions: Products (what sells — quantity, revenue, margin by product, category and brand), Customers (new vs returning, average basket, repeat rate, top spenders), Stock aging (what's gathering dust and how much money is sitting in it), plus the registers view, dashboards, heatmaps and accounting exports (§18).