Deeper look at payout scenarios using negative tender app. Since Negative tender app is activated for payout from Payments screen to get to payment screen merchant needs to get to payment from register to begin working with negative tender. Then how does the merchant get to payout if customer is not buying anything? The exact opposite of this scenario is when customer wants to buy something and needs to cash out lottery ticket and do all that in one transaction so they can use the lottery winnings to pay for some of their items.

So, what are the payout reasons you ask? Well the big one is Lottery payout. There are many more like: Payment to Vendor, any kind of buyback program including second hand clothing, sport equipment, even guns. Accepting recycle material and paying customers for it. So many payout reasons. If your merchant has more than one payout reason like lottery and vendors, then they are better off using negative tender app that enables merchants to enter multiple payout reasons themselves and then use these reasons as selection during payout process.

Continuing our conversation about payouts in this episode you are going to hear me talk about Redeem Lottery App. How does it work. How is it affiliated with state lottery (its not in any way affiliated with state lottery).

Most retailers will have a need for complex transaction process or at least for an ability to issue payout in their Point of Sale device.

On Clover merchants have many options and we are going to talk about 3 of them. Native functionality offered by Clover, and two apps offered by CSI Works.

1. Negative Tender App

2. Redeem lottery app.

So, lets tune in to our support conversation and take a listen and learn a little about differences native method and between negative tender app and redeem lottery app.

when working with price embedded barcodes and clover, merchants have increasingly more options. They can set the item up as variable or as per unit. There’s plenty of difference between the two setup methods.

When merchant uses per unit price type in inventory on clover and the barcode contains total cost then variable price barcode parser does calculation of total price which we get from scale to obtain the number of units sold in that transaction which then enables the merchant to track inventory. All is fine for most merchants but occasionally our calculation will not match scale calculation by one cent due to scale calibration and tare functions and rounding options. It’s a tough issue which can easily be fixed but at what cost to merchant? Let’s take a listen.

Clover Station 2018 is significantly different from older clover station. Apps that worked on old station had to be upgraded to work on new station. In case with Variable price barcode parser we had to re publish the app as a different app all together. Since then the old app has been unpublished and new app is compatible with old devices as well as new devices but migration for merchants is not always smooth.

Here are a few user cases that you might encounter with your merchants.

Virtually all scale devices are capable of printing different barcode formats which result in different barcode length. For instance, barcode can be 12 digits long or 13 digits long. Often 13-digit barcodes will have first digit as 0 which is not read by barcode scanner so merchant would need to ignore that zero and take the set of 6 digits starting after the zero for product code.

Sometimes 13-digit barcode does not start with a zero, yet we still need to ignore the first digit and use digits position from 2 through 7 as digits for product code.

When working with Label printing scale and Clover its important to understand that all scale devices will give merchants an option to produce different barcode compositions. For example, a barcode can have Item number and total weight of the package or barcode can have item number and total price of the package. Only one will work on clover devices with Variable Price barcode parser. The solution is in the name.

When working with price embedded barcodes its important to understand your pricing limits. Every scale that prints barcodes will have Barcode format settings where merchant would setup either 5 or 4 digits for price. If price is 5 digits it means the price can go up to 999.99 or four digits if it goes only up to 99.99. in either case it’s a setting on the scale and it’s a setting on Variable Price barcode parser. Merchant needs to select the proper selection on both scale and clover. Here are a few examples of how this issues sound on the phone.

To create an item in inventory app merchant needs to add item information including product code. Sometimes merchants will scan in the barcode into the Product Code field. This can be done with Fixed price item barcodes but with variable price barcodes it cannot be done because only part of the barcode is product code the other part of the barcode is total price of package.

When merchants have this issue its hard for them to explain or for me to quickly know that this is what’s happening. so, I would just go thought the troubleshooting steps.