Common questions

No. Both Windows and macOS are cautious about software they have not seen many times before. It is about how new the file is, not about what is in it.

On Windows, you get "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.

On a Mac, you get "SalezFlow POS cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer". Open your Applications folder, right-click (or Control-click) SalezFlow POS and choose Open, then Open again. You only need to do this the first time; after that it opens normally.

Always download from our Download page. If you got the file from anywhere else, delete it and download it again from here.

A Windows 10 or 11 PC (64-bit), or a Mac running macOS 11 or later, on Apple silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4) or Intel. About 1 GB of free disk space. Anything sold in the last several years is comfortably enough: the app runs entirely on your own machine and does not need a powerful one.

You need the internet only to register the shop, activate the licence and receive updates. Day-to-day selling works offline.

The Download page offers the Apple silicon build first, because a Mac's browser cannot tell us which chip it has. That is the right file for an M1, M2, M3 or M4 Mac.

On an older Intel Mac, click the Intel link beside it instead. The Apple silicon build will not run there.

Not sure which you have? Open the Apple menu and choose About This Mac.

Only for four things: registering the shop at setup, activating or renewing the licence, sending us a support message, and password-reset emails.

Everything else works with the internet down: sales, receipts, stock, customers, reports, backups, and password recovery with your 4-digit PIN. If we cannot be reached the app carries on quietly and tries again later. It never stops you trading because of us.

• Single PC: one computer runs the whole shop. Correct for most shops, and you can change later.
• Main PC (server): this computer holds the data and other tills connect to it.
• Extra till (client): a second counter connecting to the Main PC.

You can change this any time in Settings → Network without reinstalling. See Install & set up.

Barely. Shop type only decides which screens you start with, for example whether expiry dates and a controlled-medicine register are shown. It never changes what the till does or what anything costs.

Change what you see in Settings → Sales.

Every shop is created with a set of staff roles. If you bought through a supplier, they may have set that starting list up for you.

Either way they are yours. Open Settings → Roles to change what any role can do, rename one, or add your own. The Owner role always has full access and cannot be limited, which is what stops a shop locking itself out.

There are three ways back in, in the order to try them:

1. The 4-digit recovery PIN you set at first-run setup. On the sign-in screen choose the recovery option and enter it. This works with no internet.
2. Email reset, if the shop is online and the account has a real email address. The link opens in your browser.
3. A support code from us, if you have lost both. Contact us and we can issue a one-time code you type into the app.

Five wrong PIN attempts locks recovery for fifteen minutes. That is deliberate; wait it out rather than guessing.

If you can still sign in as the Owner, set a new one in Settings straight away.

If you cannot sign in and have no working email on the account either, contact us and we will issue a one-time support code.

Settings → Staff → Add. Give them their own account and pick a role, and never share the Owner login. Every sale, refund and cash movement is recorded against whoever was signed in, which is only useful if each person has their own account.

To stop someone working, deactivate their account rather than deleting it. Deactivating takes effect immediately, even if they are signed in.

By default a cashier lands on Checkout and does not see the dashboard, reports, costs or profit. That is the intended starting point, not a fault.

To change it, open Settings → Roles, edit the Cashier role and tick what you want them to have. It applies to everyone holding that role immediately, and nobody needs to sign out and back in.

Two usual causes:

• The device's access was removed or has passed its end date. Check Settings → Devices on the Main PC.
• The PC's clock is wrong. A clock far out of step makes the app treat a fresh login as already expired. Turn on "Set time automatically" in Windows.

If neither applies, the licence may have expired, and the app says so rather than signing you out.

That is actually how it is meant to work: the scanner behaves like a keyboard, the code lands in the search box and the item is added. If it is not being added:

• The code is not on any product yet. Open the product and put the barcode on it, or use Settings → Products to add extra codes for the same item.
• The scanner is adding a character of its own. Most scanners can be set to send Enter after the code, which is what the till expects.
• The cursor is not in the search box. Click it once and scan again.

Without leaving the till: open Recent bills on the Checkout screen, find the bill and press reprint. A cashier sees the bills they rang up; a manager sees the whole shop's.

For an older bill, use Bill History.

Yes, while the till's shift is still open, from Bill History → Cancel. It puts the stock back, reverses anything put on the customer's account and takes it out of the day's takings.

It needs a manager. If your shop uses approvals, a manager can authorise it at the till without handing over their login.

Once the shift has been closed and counted, cancelling is refused on purpose, because the day's figures have been signed off. Use a return instead, which is a visible document of its own.

On the payment step, enter each amount against its method. The screen shows what is still to pay and the bill completes when it is covered.

If your shop charges different tax on different methods, the total can move slightly as you type, because the tax follows whichever method is paying the larger share.

Yes. Hold the bill (F4), serve the next customer, then recall it (F2).

A held bill reserves nothing: the items stay on sale and the next customer may buy the last one. It also re-reads today's prices when recalled, so a bill held across a price change rings up at the new price.

Do not type the correct number over the product's stock. There is deliberately no way to do that, because it would silently erase a sale rung up a minute ago.

Use Stock-take instead: count what is really on the shelf, enter the count, and the app records the difference as an adjustment you can see later in the stock ledger. Every change to stock is recorded, so you can always find out where a discrepancy came from.

Use Write-off, not a stock-take. The two say different things: a stock-take says the books were wrong, a write-off says the books were right and the goods are gone.

Only a write-off counts as a loss against your profit, so using the right one is what makes your shrinkage figures mean anything.

Set the product's unit to kg and allow decimals on it (Products → edit → the quantity section). You can then sell 1.5 of it.

Products sold by the each stay whole numbers, so nobody can accidentally sell half an egg.

Two ways, depending on how much detail you want:

• Simple: put an expiry date on the product itself. Good when you hold one delivery at a time.
• Batches: turn on batch tracking for that product and each delivery is its own dated lot. The till then sells the soonest-expiring one first, and the receipt records which batch the customer got.

Either way the app warns you about short-dated stock, and you can set how many days' warning in Settings.

Yes. Open the product and generate a barcode, then print shelf labels from the Products screen. The app prints the code it generated, so scanning it at the till finds the item.

A product can also answer to more than one code: a case barcode, an old supplier code or a scale label, all pointing at the same item.

Attach the customer to the bill, then choose Credit as the payment method. The amount goes onto their account.

Take payment later through the customer's page. That is what clears the balance and prints a receipt for it.

Yes. Set a credit limit on the customer. A credit sale that would take them over it is refused at the till.

A limit of 0 means no limit, which is what every customer starts with, so turning this on for one customer changes nothing for anyone else.

Turn the scheme on in Settings, and set how many points a customer earns per amount spent.

Points are not a discount. The bill is priced and taxed in full and the points settle part of what is owed. That matters: treating them as a discount would mean handing over the tax you have already collected.

Points can be set to expire after a number of months; oldest points are always spent first.

The end-of-day record for one till: what it took, in what, what it expected to be in the drawer, what you actually counted, and the difference.

Once you close and count, those figures are frozen. Cancelling something next week does not quietly rewrite a slip you have already counted, printed and signed.

The app records the difference and does not hide it. A short drawer is a fact to look at, not an error to correct away.

Usual causes: a payout taken from the drawer without being recorded as an expense, a refund given in cash on a bill that was paid by card, or a float that was not entered at open. The shift's cash movements list every one of those.

Expenses. A cashier can record one, because money crossing the counter is a till action, and a cashier who cannot record it can never balance the drawer at close.

Editing or cancelling an expense afterwards needs a manager.

Work through these in order:

1. Is the printer on, with paper, and working from Windows? Print a Windows test page first.
2. In Settings → Printing, is the right printer selected and the paper width correct (80 mm or 58 mm)? Send a test receipt.
3. If the till is set to print on the shop printer, the desktop app must be open on the Main PC, which is the machine holding the printer. If it is closed, nothing can be relayed to it.
4. On a tablet or phone, printing goes through the browser's own print dialog, which has to be confirmed.

A printer failure never fails a sale. The bill is saved either way and you can reprint it.

Full details in the printer guide.

Yes. Connect the printer to the Main PC and set the other tills to print on the shop printer. See Receipt printers & barcode scanners.

The Main PC must be switched on with the app open for this to work, which it must be anyway, since it holds the shop's data.

That is the security gate doing its job. On the Main PC, open Settings → Devices, find the pending request and approve it.

A device that has been reinstalled or had its browser data cleared comes back as a new request, so approve the newest row. See Devices & how many can connect.

The till holds no data of its own, so this always means the Main PC cannot be reached:

1. Is the Main PC switched on with the app open?
2. Is the till on the same network? Guest Wi-Fi usually blocks devices from seeing each other.
3. Has the Main PC's address changed? A fixed address (or a DHCP reservation on the router) stops that happening again.

Connect terminals, tablets and phones covers the wiring.

Settings → Backup → Download backup, as the Owner. Weekly is a sensible habit, plus always before a Windows reinstall or a change of computer.

Keep the file somewhere that is not this PC. A backup on the machine that dies is not a backup.

Install on the new PC, and on the first screen choose Restore an existing shop rather than setting up a new one. Give it your backup file and your licence key.

If it says the licence is in use on another computer, the app will email a one-time release code to the licence's registered address. See Backups & moving to a new PC.

No, and it will not work if you try. The shop's data file is encrypted and its key is tied to that user account on that machine, which is exactly what stops someone walking off with it.

Always move a shop with a backup.

No. The program and your shop's data are separate, and installing a newer version over an older one keeps everything.

• Windows: the uninstaller asks whether to delete your data, with a tick box. Leave it unticked and the data stays.
• Mac: drag SalezFlow POS from Applications to the Trash. That removes the app only; your shop's data stays put. There is no uninstaller asking about it, so nothing is deleted by accident.

Your data lives in %APPDATA%\POS on Windows and ~/Library/Application Support/POS on a Mac. Deleting that folder erases the shop permanently, so take a backup before you go near it.

Yes, always. Every blocked screen (expired licence, unsupported version, wrong clock) and the sign-in screen itself carry an emergency export. Enter an Owner's email and password and it hands you the whole shop as a file.

The licence check exists to stop trading on unlicensed software, never to hold your records hostage.

Contact us to renew. Once we do, press Sync now in Settings → License and it updates immediately. You do not need to reinstall or re-enter anything.

After the expiry date there is normally a short grace period during which you keep trading with a banner. After that, selling is blocked until the licence is renewed, but you can still read and export your own data.

The commonest cause is that the app was copied to a different computer rather than restored from a backup, and the licence is tied to the machine it was activated on.

Use the restore flow in Backups & moving to a new PC, which releases the licence properly. If you are on the original PC and still see this, contact us.

Not yet. Automatic updates work on Windows only. On a Mac the app still tells you when a new version is out, but you install it yourself:

1. Quit the app.
2. Open the Download page and take the newest Mac build.
3. Open the .dmg and drag SalezFlow POS onto the Applications folder, choosing Replace.

Your data is kept, because it lives outside the app. See Updates & staying supported.

On a Mac there is nothing to fail, because updating there is always by hand, from the Download page.

On Windows, check the PC is genuinely online, then try again. After a few failures the app offers an Inspect button showing exactly what it tried and what came back. Send us that and we can usually answer straight away.

Meanwhile, download the installer from the Download page and run it over the top of your existing install. Your data is kept. See Updates & staying supported.

Support for that build has ended and selling is blocked until you update. Update from that screen, or install the newest version from the Download page over the top.

That screen re-checks with us as it opens, so if we have extended the deadline for you it simply lets you back in. It also carries a link to export your data.

Every sale, report and licence date depends on the computer's clock, so the app refuses to work on one that is badly out.

• Windows: Settings → Time & language → Date & time, and turn on Set time automatically.
• Mac: System Settings → General → Date & Time, and turn on Set time and date automatically.

The warning clears by itself within a moment of the clock being right, and you do not need to restart anything.

On a tablet, check the tablet's own clock.

First try reloading the screen. If it comes back:

1. Note exactly what you were doing.
2. Open Settings → Advanced, where the app keeps a log of serious errors, and export it.
3. Send both to us through Help & Feedback in the app.

Your data is not affected by a screen failing to draw.

1. Restart the computer. This clears the commonest cause, a previous copy still running in the background.
2. Reinstall the newest version from the Download page over the top. Do not uninstall first; installing over the top keeps your data.
3. If it still will not open, contact us. Do not delete anything or uninstall, because your shop's data is on that machine and we would rather recover it than have it removed.

From inside the app: Help & Feedback. It sends the message with your shop's details attached, which saves a round of questions, and our replies appear on the same screen.

If the app cannot reach us, use the contact form from any phone or computer.