A Location (also: a Store, a Warehouse) is the physical place which has an inventory and where sales transactions take place.
Locations have the following properties:
Inventory. Inventory is tracked separately for each location. Inventory always arrives into a specific location; Location is a required field on an Inventory Registration or a Purchase Invoice. Erply knows which batches are in stock in each location (and what is the cost of each batch), and when selling, the sold items are picked from that location's batches according to the FIFO principle (ie., oldest first). Inventory can be moved between locations by creating an Inventory Transfer. When transfering, inventory retains the cost at which it was originally purchased.
Contact information. A location can have an address, phone number, e-mail, website, bank accounts. When these have been specified, this information will override company's general contact information on printouts (eg. on sales invoice, purchase order printouts).
Price Lists. A location can have up to five price lists. These lists — which thus become "store price lists" — apply whenever items are sold from that location. (Customer and customer group price lists apply on top of store price lists, and so do promotions.)
User rights. It is possible to define for each user which locations they have access to.
Time Zone. Each location can be in a different time zone.
POS quick buttons. The set of products for which there should be quick access buttons in POS interface, are defined per-location. (It is also possible to use the same set of quick buttons for all locations.)
Registers. A location may contain zero or more Registers. A Register is the terminal, or point of sale, where a cashier works and which contains a set of point-of-sale (POS) hardware: a computer terminal, a receipt printer, a cash drawer, optionally a card payment terminal and a pole display.
To ring up sales in a point-of-sale application, a Register needs to be defined, and all sales made from that point of sale get associated with that register. Cash counting and Z Reports are done per register. Z report is the sales and payments report that is printed at shop closing time, or at the end of a shift, and lists totals by payment type (by cash, by card, by gift card, etc.) Typically, the cashier also needs to count the amount of cash in the drawer and enter the counted amount for verification.