Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

for Joshua and Caleb General Merchandise

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND SYSTEMS

This chapter presents the review of related literature and related system. By these

studies and system, the researchers gained more knowledge which helped them in

building their research and provided a consistent basis of their study.

A. Review of Related Literature

Transaction Processing System (TPS)

A transaction occurs when goods and services are exchanged for some form of

payment. Transaction process is a term that refers to the adding, changing, deleting, or

looking up of a record in a data file or database by entering the data at a terminal or

workstation. (Hoffman, 2001) stated that most transaction processing systems also

include a method of ensuring that all the information entered as a transaction is

simultaneously saved. When a large number of transactions are taken and then stored to

be dealt with at a later time, the process is known as batch processing. In a batch

processing system, transactions accumulated over a period of time are processed as a

single unit, or batch. For example, a store may update its sales records every day after the

store closes. Or a payroll system may process all the time cards every two weeks to

determine employee earnings and produce paychecks. In a real-time processing system,

transactions are processed immediately as they occur without any delay to accumulate

transactions. The records in the system always reflect the current status. Real time data

processing is used by Point of Sale (POS) Systems to update inventory, provide inventory

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history, and sales of a particular item - allowing an organization to run payments in real

time.

One place where transaction processing has made a big splash is in the internet.

The advent of online technology has made the international distribution of goods and

information a quick and often simple process. (Hoffman, 2001) also stated that the

customers have grown accustomed to placing orders online. The emergence of features

like secure servers, one-click shopping, and tracking of packages over the internet have

helped make them feel more at ease with the process.

On the other hand, (Clair, 2001) claimed that transaction processing on the

internet includes several options for those who want to use a credit card or a checking

account to pay for goods that do not originate from a typical e-business site, almost as if

it is digital cash. One example of this type of service is PayPal, the world's first,

successful, instant and secure online payment service. With PayPal, anyone can register

to send and receive payments through the Internet. This service has gained most of its

popularity on auction sites like eBay, but can also be used for simple transactions

between any two people in the world that have access to the internet.

The researchers adopted the TPS which helped them in maintaining the stability

of their database in the event of network failure and also in gathering, changing, storing

and retrieving data.

Laravel

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web application framework, created by Taylor

Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is created to save time and effort. It also

provides high-level abstractions of common web development patterns that help

researchers in a convenient shortcut for frequent programming tasks, and clear

conventions on how to solve problems.

Laravel strives to make the entire PHP development experience delightful,

including local development environment. Vagrant provides a simple, elegant way to

manage and provision Virtual Machines.

Laravel is a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks. Web-

frameworks make it easier to develop an application. Most sites have a common set of

functionality (like handling sessions and data validation) and a framework is something

that prevents the developer from re-writing this, each time when creating a website.

(McDade, 2011).

The researchers used the Laravel framework to have a clean and clear directory

path for its application and helped them in having a web application that is developer

friendly and maintainable codes.

Ajax

Ajax was originally an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

“Asynchronous” means that multiple events are happening independently of one another.

Once a client initializes an Ajax callback to the server, the client will not need to wait for

a response and can continue to use the web application while the request is being

processed. Once done, the server will send a response back to the client and the client

will process it as necessary. JavaScript is the client-side programming language

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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and XML is a markup language to define data. JSON is another markup language to

define data. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is much easier to use with JavaScript

than XML. Another major advance to JavaScript and Ajax is the JavaScript object library

called jQuery (Dalton, 2013)

Dalton also added that this free open-source software is a wrapper around

JavaScript. jQuery is used to easily write client-side JavaScript to navigate and

manipulate a page and make asynchronous Ajax callbacks. Ajax should be used

anywhere in a web application where small amounts of information could be saved or

retrieved from the server without posting back the entire pages, a good example of this is

data validation on save actions. Another example would be to change the values in a drop

down list-box based on other inputs, such as state and college list boxes. When the user

selects a state, the college list box will repopulate with only colleges and universities in

that state.

Another great example is when the client needs to save or retrieve session values

from the server, based on a user preference such as the height, width or position of an

object. Adjusting the width could make a call-back to the server to set the session

variable for the new width. This way, whenever the page is refreshed, the server can

adjust the object’s width based on this session variable. Otherwise, the object would go

back to its initial default width.

The researchers used Ajax to be able to come up with more detailed and broad

information on how the system works efficiently and effectively for business

manipulation.

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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Point of Sales (POS)

Point of sales software is a type of software that retail store use to calculate their

sales. Point of sales add up the sales total and calculate the change. When customer buy

items from retail store, point of sales will minus or debit the amount of item sold in the

inventory system. At minimum, POS should be able to handle sales and manage your

inventory database (Hamon, 2010).

POS system is mostly found in supermarkets, consist of the checkout counter, bar

code scanner, and the cash register. Every time when an item is scanned, the system

count the cost; till all the items selected by the customer are scanned, the system will

calculate the total cost of all item that customer would like to purchase. Customer will

then pay amount money, using either credit card or cash. If customer pays by cash, the

point of sales system will allow the cashier to input the amount of money that customer

pay and calculate the balance that should be returned to the customer.

With a POS system, a business can analyze sales data; figure out how well all the

items on the shelves sell, and adjust purchasing levels accordingly. A business can

maintain a sales history to help adjust your buying decisions for seasonal purchasing

trends. A business can also improve pricing accuracy by integrating bar-code scanners

and credit card authorization ability with the POS system.

Reporting capabilities available in POS programs include sales, costs, and profits

by individual inventory items, by salesperson, or by category for the day, month and year

to date. Special reports can include sales for each hour of the day for any time period. A

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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business can also create multiple formats for invoices, accounting statements and price

tags (Simons, 2011).

In this study, the researchers used POS to understand well the purpose of

conducting a point of sale and for creating a Web-Based Point of Sales System for Joshua

and Caleb General Merchandise.

The above mentioned related literature helped the researchers to have a better

understanding in the development and design of a proposed system for Joshua and Caleb

General Merchandise.

B. Review of Related Systems

Vend Point of Sales System

Vend is a responsive point of sale system that makes it fast and easy to sell to

customers. Vend can be connected to all of the latest hardware – barcode scanners,

receipt printers, cash drawers.

Figure 1.0 presents the functions of the Vend Point-of-Sale System that the

researchers adopted in their proposed system. The following are the functions used as a

basis in the development.

Edit Payment Type. Payment type which has the list of Cash and Credit.

Add Products. In adding products the system will prompt the user to enter a

product name and description of the product. Also, the user can input the product name,

category, the supplier, sales account code, purchase account code.

Add Customer. Vend allows the user to add customer and save their records. If a

customer will come back and buy some products, Vend can easily recognize the

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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customer’s record. In adding customers the user must input the customer’s details,

contact information and address.

Figure 1.0: Vend Point of Sale System Procedures

Figure 2.0 displays the daily to monthly sales history, allowing the user to view

sales history by 7 days, 14 days and 30 days together with the total sales, average day

total and average sale value within the selected days. The line graph illustrates and

records on how many products have been sold depending on the chosen Sales History

day.

On the other hand, Vend point-of-sale system and also provide a table indicating

popular products bought for the past 7 days, 14 days and 30 days.

The above mentioned related system helped the researchers on how to provide a

statistical report of the product sold at the specific time frame and for the enhancement of

the client’s business operations.

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

for Joshua and Caleb General Merchandise

Figure 2.0: Vend Point-of-Sale System Sales History

Keyhut’s Cash Register Software

This system design is for small business. It works with any cash

register/printer/computer combo the user might have. For extremely small businesses, the

software can be run off from home computer provided.

Just like some other Point-of-Sale system, some of the functions that the user can

access using KeyHut’s Cash Register are inventory, journal, discounts, payment options,

receipt coupons , sales recording , stock table , tax rate chart, reports, purchase orders,

price checks, etc.

The user can easily checked sales reports which consist of Total Sales, Employee

Sales, Hourly Readings and Gift ward as displayed in figure 3.0. While the user can also

view the Merchandise Reports which are the Total by Stock No, Total by Category, Total

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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by Vendor, Employee by Stock No, History by Category, History by Vendor, Inventory

by Stock No, Inventory by Category, Inventory by Vendor, Profit and Inventory Value.

Figure 3.0: KeyHut’s Cash Register Software Cash Reports

An overall view of the Keyhut’s Cash Register and Point of Sale Software is

illustrated in figure 4.0. Keyhut’s Cash Register Software allowed user to monitor item

description, number of stocks, price and amount and manipulate tax. Keyhut’s also

allowed the user to sell product directly by entering the stock number, price and quantity.

In addition, it displayed the subtotal, tax and total by the product being sold.

Similar to other Point-of-Sale system, some functions that the user can access

using KeyHut’s Cash Register are inventory, journal, discounts, payment options, receipt

coupons, sales recording, stock table, tax rate chart, reports, purchase orders, price

checks, etc.

This related system will be applied in a concentrated study to make the

researchers be more informative and to create an accurate design under and functions

upon developing the study.

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

for Joshua and Caleb General Merchandise

Figure 4.0: KeyHut’s Cash Register Software overall view of the Point-of-Sale Software

This related system helped the researchers in understanding the flow of a sales

transaction and made them more informative in basic accounting.

Imonggo POS Software

Imonggo inventory system allowed user to check the value and cost of the

customers’ orders and the quantity of product orders. Figure 5.0 displays the entire

inventory so that the user can check the items that were bought, who bought it and can

monitor previous transactions.

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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Figure 5.0: Stockroom Immoggo Products Page Point of Sale System

Figure 6.0 displays the Office interface where the owner of the business can

monitor the summary of sales, check previous transactions and generate sales reports.

Business owner can also manage their customers and even create their own customers.

The control panel helps the users to manage their accounts and they can customize

invoice printing.

Figure 6.0: Stockroom Immoggo Office Point of Sale System

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 Development of a Web-Based Point of Sale System

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Imonggo has different kinds of features. First is the Office which is shown on

figure 6.0 and the Store which is shown in figure 7.0. The Stockroom has two (2) choices

as shown in figure 8.0 which are the Products and Transactions.

Figure 7.0: Stockroom Immoggo Home Page Point of Sale System

Figure 8.0: Stockroom Immoggo Transactions Point of Sale System

This related research on Imonggo Point of Sale System helped the researchers in

creating an accurate design for the different interfaces of the proposed system.

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