Adding a second till: multi-till POS for one shop

One till is enough until it isn’t: a queue at lunchtime, a second counter, a terrace, a tablet for the kitchen. Universal Till lets you add more tills to the same shop without a network engineer and without a cloud account. One till is the main till; the others join it and share the catalogue, prices, settings and stock automatically, over your shop’s own network.

Pairing a new till in a minute

1. On the main till, go to Settings → Tills and press Show pairing code. It shows a short code (like K7P-4XQ), the main till’s address underneath, and a QR code. The code works once and expires after 10 minutes.
2. Install Universal Till on the new device, choose Join an existing shop and give it a name, such as “Bar” or “Terrace”.
3. Either type the code and the address, or press Find a primary on this network and pick your main till from the list. If you search, both screens show the same 6-digit number: check they match, and a manager approves the request on the main till. Pairing is never automatic, so a device on your Wi-Fi can’t quietly join your shop.

The new till then copies the whole shop across (products, prices, settings, stock and staff), which can take up to a minute on a busy network. It is given its own register automatically, so staff can open a shift on it straight away.

What the tills share

• Sales from every till flow back to the main till, so the whole shop’s sales end up in one place.
• Catalogue changes can be made by admins and managers on any till, not just the main one. They’re saved on the main till and reach the others within seconds (half a minute at most). If two people edit the same item, the second one is asked to reload instead of overwriting the first person’s change.
• Shop-wide settings (payment options, the receipt design, the lock timeout and so on) are kept on the main till too. Settings that belong to one till, like its printer or its screen, stay on that till.
• Stock is counted by the main till. An additional till never refuses a sale because its own copy of the stock number is a few seconds behind. If two tills sell the last one at the same moment, it shows up on the main till’s dashboard instead of blocking a customer.
• Gift vouchers work shop-wide: sell one on any till and spend it on any other till that can reach the main till, and two tills can’t spend the same balance at once.
• Plugins follow the main till: install one there and every joined till downloads and checks it within about half a minute.
• Updates follow the main till as well. An additional till moves to the main till’s version at the next moment it has no open sale, or shows a note where it can’t install updates by itself yet (on Android, for example).

When a till loses touch

On an additional till, the status bar has a light that always says in words what it means: Main till linked, or Main till not reachable since … — selling offline. Either way, that till keeps selling. Its sales wait on the till and sync as soon as the main till is back. While it’s out of touch, the shop-wide settings show read-only, with a note saying why, so nobody makes a change that would be lost.

If the main till comes back on a different network address after a restart, the additional till finds it again on its own. It only reconnects to the main till it was paired with, so another device can’t take its place. If your Wi-Fi stops devices from seeing each other, an additional till can also ask your shop’s cloud account where the main till last said it was, as long as both tills are connected to the cloud.

Order boards, kitchen displays and self-order

Extra devices don’t have to be tills in the usual sense. A tablet can be a self-order screen where customers build their own order, or an Order status board showing orders from every till as they come in. A station’s kitchen display runs on the till that takes its orders, on a second screen plugged into it. An order board or kitchen display keeps showing and updating orders through service, and asks for a PIN only if someone tries to open anything else.

Every till in the shop runs the same software, on whatever mix of devices you have: a Raspberry Pi, a PC or a tablet. Download Universal Till to set up your main till, or read the getting-started guide.