An intelligent web-based point of sales management system for small and medium scale businesses

Abstract

The increase in population globally has caused organisations and businesses to move from square rooms, table-top and containers into supermarkets, malls and more. With this expansion in businesses, the traditional pen and paperwork system for keeping records are becoming more difficult for salespersons and shop owners everywhere. However, the introduction of the point-of-sales management system and advancement in technologies have elevated the challenges facing shop owners in managing their daily sales and balance sheet. Despite the overwhelming number of POS systems available, wholesalers and retailers' in low-income counties such as Ghana see some challenges with the existing POS, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendliness. Thus, the cultural difference makes it difficult for easy adaptation of shop owners to off-the-shell POS system. Hence, the current study sought to design and develop a user-friendly, low-cost intelligent web-based point of sales management system for small and medium scale business in the Bono region of Ghana, based on a user-centred approach. Using a waterfall model, we implement a POS system based on XAMP server and MySQL database as backend and PHP for server-side scripting. At the same time, HTML and CSS were used for front end development. Our experimental setup with ten students shows that the proposed system is easy to use and robust. Thus, it has a user-friendly interface for even novice to learn it with ease.