From a cash register or Excel to a POS in one weekend
Moving from an old cash register, a notebook or an Excel sheet to a POS takes one weekend if the product list is ready first. A two-day plan for UAE shops.
Switching POS without re-typing your products
The biggest fear when changing point of sale is a week of typing. What you can bring over from your old system or spreadsheet, what you cannot, and a step-by-step plan that keeps the shop open.
Ask an owner why they still use a till they dislike and the answer is rarely the price. It is "I have 3,000 products in there" and "my customers owe me money and it's all in the old system". Nobody wants to spend a week typing barcodes, or lose track of who owes what.
The good news: almost everything that matters can come across in one afternoon, if you do it in the right order.
What you can bring
- Products: name (in two languages if you have them), barcode, price, cost, category, unit, tax.
- Customers: name, phone, and what each one owes you today.
- Suppliers: name, phone, and what you owe each one today.
- Opening stock: how many of each product you have on the shelf.
What you should not try to bring
Sales history. Old receipts belong to the old system and your accountant's files; importing them invites duplicates and wrong VAT reports. Keep an export of the old system for reference, and start the new one with opening balances: what each customer owes and what you owe each supplier on the day you switch. That is all the new till needs to carry on.
Step by step
- Export from the old system. Most systems can save products and customers as Excel or CSV. If yours cannot, a spreadsheet you keep yourself works just as well.
- Don't tidy the file first. Column order, headings in Arabic or English, prices written as "1,250.50" or "AED 12": a good importer reads them as they are.
- Check the guess. The importer should show which column it thinks is the barcode, the price, the cost, and why. Correct anything wrong.
- Read the dry run. Before anything is saved: "will add 1,240 products, update 85, skip 12; 310 customers with 18,450.00 owed in total". Skipped rows should come with a plain reason: a barcode that is too short, a price missing, the same barcode twice.
- Import, then spot-check. Scan ten products at the till. Open five customers and compare their balances with the old system.
- Count the shelves you trust least. Opening stock is only as good as the count behind it; do a stock-take of the fast movers in the first week.
Switch on a quiet day
Pick the evening before your slowest day. Import products and customers, set the opening balances to that date, and run the first morning on the new till with the old one still available for lookups. Most shops never open the old one again after the second day.
If something goes wrong
Mistakes happen: the wrong file, prices in the cost column. The import should be one batch you can undo for a while, without touching anything you sold since.
In CreekPOS
CreekPOS Online has Settings → Bring your data for products, customers, suppliers, opening balances and opening stock, from Excel (.xlsx) or CSV, in any column order and in English, Arabic, Hindi or Urdu headings. The exports of several common systems are recognised as they are, with empty templates for shops starting from scratch. You see every finding and the dry run before importing, and you can undo an import for 30 days. It is available from the Retail plan; product import from a spreadsheet is also part of our setup help. See the manual chapter or start a free trial and try it with your own file.
This article is general information as of its date, not legal or tax advice. Rules change; check the official source or ask your accountant before acting.
