How to Make a Sale in QuickBooks Point of Sale

Starting the sale

From the home screen choose Make a Sale, or press the shortcut your till is set up with. You get an empty sales receipt ready for items.

Adding items

Scan the barcode, or type the item number and press Enter. To search by name, start typing and pick from the list.

Change a quantity by typing the number before scanning, or by editing the line after. For a weighed or measured item, enter the quantity in the unit the item is set up in - getting this wrong is the usual cause of a margin that looks impossible on a report later.

Discounts and customers

Apply a discount to a single line or to the whole receipt, depending on what you are doing - a damaged-box discount belongs on the line, a staff discount belongs on the receipt.

To attach the sale to a customer, choose the customer field and select or create them. This is what makes sales history, statements and account balances work; skip it and the sale is anonymous forever.

Taking payment

Choose Tender. Select cash, card, cheque or account, and enter the amount. QuickBooks works out the change for cash. For a split payment, enter the first amount and then the second method for the balance.

Once tendered, the sale is final: inventory comes down, the transaction lands in your day''s takings, and the receipt prints.

What the software did behind that

One tender did four things - reduced inventory, recorded revenue, recorded cost of goods against the item, and updated the customer record if one was attached. That is why ringing something up manually as a miscellaneous item quietly breaks your reporting: the money is right, the inventory is not.

Still on QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale?

Intuit stopped selling and supporting it in October 2023. Existing tills keep working, but with no updates and no support.

The workflow above is the same on any modern system, so moving does not mean retraining your cashiers from scratch. Our point of sale systems page shows how it works day to day, and you can ask us anything about moving your data across.