Need Help with Register Programming

[DavidEHIckey]

Good Morning, I'm a trustee at a Private Club. We recently had a string of problems with our old Sharp ER 3110 registers and our last one went out. Being that times are tough we cannot afford to spend a fortune on a new one. We found a Sharp XE-A302 for a very reasonable price. I realize its a cheap register but I think it will work for now. We mainly run a standard bar selling Beer, Liquor, Wine and mixed drinks, some snacks, and then we sell things like fish fry tickets, and have special events that we try to track money on. My main question in starting to read the manual is I'm a little confused on PLU's Departments Sub/Departments and when exactly to use them. I want to make things as easy as possible for our accountant. So if the accountant is tracking Liquor sales, beer sales, special events, and membership dues. Would I set up a department for each and then associate each PLU with a deparment?????? I just want to organize it the best I can, and the manual is pretty confusing to a 1st time register programmer. "our last system we bought 15 years ago cost 14,000.00 and the dealer did most of the initial programming" Any help anyone could provide in the structure and setup would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
David

[alshorses]

Sometimes you need to be a rocket scientist to figure those things out.

[METROmilwaukee]

I work with software all the time and I can suggest the following:

a.) Keep your categories (departments) very simple no deeper than three levels and even that is getting too complex.
b.) ask the accountant for advice how to categorize
c.) yes, to your questiom, it sounds like you have the major category understood what I am saying is do no go off the deep end creating sub-categories (sub-departments)

I had no idea a "register" could cost that kind of money. If I were a stick-up guy I would leave the cash and take the register. ;-)

[Interstate]

I can give you an example on how I set these items up.

Department = Domestic Beer
Subdepartment = Budweiser
PLU = Budlite, Budweiser, Bud Select

or

Department = Beer
Sub-department = Domestic
PLU = budlite, Pabst, Carolina Ale, Miller Lite


You really just have to decide how detailed you want to be when taking reports. I work with some folks who just have a beer department and a beer PLU. They don't want to know what sells they just want a total at the end of the day.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need any further help.

Patrick
919-961-3518