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Reality check

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There is no harder reality check that trying to use a mass marketed product you developed and finding it's hard edges for your particular necessities at a different point. Also it is really hard to get off your builder hat when it is not even in your turf to add those capabilites to the development roadmap of said product.

It is impressive how many small and micro enterprises work with sub optimal solutions or the bare minimum functionallity and end up exporting information and doing the extra work on spreadsheets.

It might look like small things but those are actual needs of a group of customers that are not being met; and I get the other side of the picture, there is no way that a product team can provide solutions for those needs while being constrained on resources and juggling with the needs of the high utilization volume users.

This post I'm trying to be vague but for some examples here are somethings I'm currently missing.

* In a cash payment to be able to record returns. I'm not even sure why this is not even there.
* In a cash box being able to represent in the system what is held currently
* In a cash box being able to suggest how to cash out a transaction with current available elements
* In a cash box being able to record additions, substractions or mismatches in existing items held
* In a transaction being able to change the payment method or use mixed payment methods
* In a in location point of sale, being able to sort and use multiple layouts for the options.
* In a POS with product catalog being able to work with local cache instead of full round trips on each interaction. Having a line of clients waiting and the system doing load screens on each item is really a bad experience for both user and customer.

Also if this is not possible, I would like to have APIs to do so, but I know that they are not there from the public documentation and also I'm not in a position to actually devote time to develop my UI even if they where there. Therefore I end up with a suboptimal solution and work arounds with the bare minimum.

Wonder how many micro enterprises have to deal with this on a daily basis. There is a lot of friction and waste but not enough resources to actually solve this problem.

In the end I might have to bite the bullet and end up building something on my own.

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