Data security

Your sales are your business. Here is how they are kept.

A POS system holds the two things a restaurant cannot afford to lose: what it sold, and what it is owed. Most of keeping that safe is not dramatic. It is knowing who did what, keeping more than one copy, and being able to get it back.

Who can reach what

The most common way a business loses money through its POS is not an outsider. It is a void nobody can account for. GeniusPos is built so that every action has a name against it.

Every person signs in as themselves

Each member of staff gets their own account — there is no package that limits how many. Nobody works the till under a shared login, which is what makes everything below worth having.

You choose what each of them can reach

Permissions are set per account: you decide which employee gets which parts of the system. A cashier can ring up a sale without being able to open the takings, change a price, or edit the menu. On Pro you can go further and control who is allowed to open a bill at all.

The system keeps a record of what was done

Voids, refunds, discounts and price overrides are each recorded and each has its own report, so an unusual one is something you can look up rather than something you hear about. On Pro an action log tracks changes more broadly, and clock-in and clock-out tie a shift to a person.

And it will tell you whose shift it was

On Pro the reports break down by employee — performance, item sales and commission. The point is not to watch people. It is that when a number looks wrong, you are looking at one shift and one name instead of a month and a shrug.

The controls around the cash

Access control is only half of it. The other half is having two independent records that ought to agree, so that a problem shows up as a discrepancy rather than as a suspicion.

The till is opened and closed by someone

Managing the till, and recording money paid in and out of it, are on every package. So is an X reading — the mid-shift count that tells you what the drawer should hold right now, rather than finding out at midnight.

Open items are the gap worth watching

A cash register open item lets staff ring up something that is not on the menu, which every restaurant needs and which is also the easiest thing to abuse. It is available on every package, it is reported like anything else, and it is worth deciding on purpose who is allowed to use it.

Stock is the second opinion

Stock takes and stock movement are on every package, and on Pro recipe inventory ties a dish to what it should have consumed. That gives you a number to check the till against: what was sold and what was used should tell the same story, and it is the disagreement that is informative.

Money you are owed, and property you are holding

Account balances and credit sit against the customer who ran them up, and custody — a bottle kept behind the bar for a regular — is tracked as its own inventory with a record of what has been claimed. Both are things a business can lose quietly, because nobody notices an absence.

Two copies, not one

The till keeps its own copy of your menu, your stock and your sales, and works from it whether or not the internet is behaving. That copy syncs to the cloud, on every package — so the day's takings are not sitting on one tablet on one counter. An iPad that is dropped, stolen or simply replaced is a hardware problem, not a lost month of sales.

Backups are part of the same idea. The system takes them, you can take one yourself at any time, and a backup can be restored onto a new device — which is what turns a broken till into an afternoon's inconvenience. Older transactions can be archived off the live database to keep the app quick; archived records stay readable in your reports and past receipts, and stop being editable.

The part that is down to you

None of the above survives a shared login. If four people work under one account, the system can only tell you that the account did something — the reports still run, they just stop meaning anything. Accounts are unlimited on every package precisely so that nobody has a reason to share one.

The same goes for what leaves the system. On Pro you can export raw data as a spreadsheet file, which is your data and your right to take — but a spreadsheet of your sales and your members on someone's laptop is outside every control on this page. Who you grant access to, and what they take away with them, is the decision the software cannot make for you. Whose data is whose, and what the system holds about your customers, is set out separately.

Ask us the specific question

If you have a requirement to satisfy — a landlord, a franchisor, an auditor, or your own policy on where records live — ask us directly rather than reading between the lines here. This page describes what the product does and stops there on purpose: the questions about hosting, retention, and what happens to your data if you leave deserve a real answer for your setup rather than a paragraph written for everyone.

Call +60 11-3527 3919 or email sales@geniuspos.com.my and we will answer it.