Point of Sale, usually shortened to POS, is the Odoo application for selling directly to customers in person, in a shop, a restaurant, or anywhere a transaction happens face to face. This piece explains what the Odoo Point of Sale application does.
What Odoo POS is for
Odoo POS is the till. It is the interface a cashier or a server uses to ring up a sale: select products, take payment, complete the transaction, and, where needed, print or send a receipt. It is designed to be fast and simple to use, because a point of sale is used under pressure, with a customer waiting, and it has to be quick. Odoo POS is part of Odoo Community, so it is available without the Enterprise edition.
Sessions
Odoo POS organises selling into sessions. A session is opened when the point of sale starts trading, typically the start of a shift or a day, and closed when trading stops. All the sales made through that point of sale belong to the session, and closing the session reconciles what was taken. Sessions give POS a clean, controlled structure: there is always a defined period that the sales and the cash belong to, which makes the day's takings accountable.
Retail and restaurant
Odoo POS serves two broad situations. For retail, it is a straightforward shop till: products, payment, receipt. For restaurants, there is a restaurant extension that adds what hospitality needs: floor plans and tables, so an order is tied to where the customers are sitting; the ability to split a bill; courses; and kitchen printing, so orders reach the kitchen. The same core POS, extended, serves both a shop counter and a restaurant floor.
Payments and hardware
Odoo POS handles the practical realities of taking payment. It supports multiple payment methods, cash and card, and integrates with a range of payment terminals so card payments are taken cleanly. It works with point-of-sale hardware, and there is a self-service kiosk option for businesses that want customers to order themselves. The point is that Odoo POS is built to sit in a real selling environment with real hardware, not just to be a screen.
The connected advantage
What makes Odoo POS more than a standalone till is, as always with Odoo, connection. A sale through POS is not an isolated event recorded in a separate cash register. It is connected to the rest of the system. It reduces stock in Inventory, so what is sold over the counter is reflected in stock levels automatically. It posts to Accounting, so the day's takings reach the books without separate entry. It can connect to loyalty programmes and to customer records. A business running Odoo POS alongside the rest of Odoo has its in-person selling joined to its stock and its finances, rather than maintaining a till that has to be reconciled into everything else by hand.
Who Odoo POS suits
Odoo POS suits any business that sells in person, a shop, a chain of shops, a restaurant, a counter, and especially a business that wants that in-person selling connected to the same system that runs its stock, its accounting, and the rest of its operation. For a business already running Odoo, adding POS means the physical point of sale becomes part of one connected whole.
The takeaway
The Odoo Point of Sale application is the till for in-person selling, organised into sessions, serving both retail and, with its restaurant extension, hospitality, with support for payment terminals and POS hardware. Its strength is that a face-to-face sale is connected to inventory and accounting rather than recorded in an isolated register. For how we approach Odoo, see our ERP practice.