Honest boundaries
What Proper Till does, and what it leaves alone.
Plenty of products describe their limits in grey text at the bottom of a page. It is more useful to you, and frankly easier for us, to say it clearly: here is the shape of the tool, so you can tell in five minutes whether it fits your counter.
What it is for
- Ringing up sales quickly on a tablet, laptop, desktop or phone.
- Keeping a shared product catalogue with prices, categories, barcodes and favourites.
- Counted items and items sold by weight, with open-price items where you deliberately allow them.
- Working out cash change, and recording card payments taken on your own terminal.
- Parking a sale and recalling it, and cancelling a sale before it is paid.
- Keeping completed sales as permanent records, with linked refunds and reversals rather than edits.
- Printing simple receipts, and reprints that are marked as copies.
- Cashing up a session or a day, with tender totals, discounts and variance.
- Importing your products from a spreadsheet, and exporting your figures back out.
- Backing up and restoring the whole till through files you control.
What it deliberately does not do
It is not a payment processor
Your card terminal takes the card payment. Proper Till records that it happened. No card numbers, expiry dates, security codes or PINs are captured, stored or transmitted, anywhere in the product.
It is not your accounts
Summaries are operational: useful for cashing up, spotting a short drawer and keeping records. They are not a set of accounts, a profit figure or a bank reconciliation, and they do not replace your bookkeeping or your accountant.
It does not file your VAT
You configure your own VAT categories and rates, and the till applies them. It does not submit returns, and it does not produce documents that call themselves VAT invoices. Where a rate or category is unresolved, the till says so rather than guessing.
It is not a stock system
There is no stock ledger, purchase ordering, supplier management or warehouse counting. It sells what is in your catalogue; it does not track how many of them you have left.
It is not cloud backup or sync
Your till lives in your browser and moves through backup files you download. There is no automatic cloud copy and no live syncing between devices or staff phones.
It cannot outrank your browser
If browser data is cleared or a device is lost, the till on that device goes with it. That is why backups are treated as a core feature rather than a settings-page afterthought.
Not in the first release
These are honest "not yet" items rather than refusals, and none of them is promised with a date:
- Splitting one sale across two payment methods.
- Multi-buy offers, promotions and loyalty schemes.
- Customer accounts and order histories.
- Cash-drawer and scale hardware control.
- Emailing or texting receipts.
- Thermal receipt-printer layouts, beyond ordinary browser printing.
Who it fits, and who it does not
It fits an independent shop, café, bakery, pub, takeaway, market stall, community shop or charity event that wants a fast, reliable till without a contract, a monthly fee or a box of proprietary hardware.
It is the wrong tool if you need integrated card processing in one device, live stock control across branches, or a single system that also does your accounts. Those are real needs, and pretending to meet them would waste your time and your trust.