What's new in Universal Till: self-order kiosk, LAN pairing and a searchable manual

Universal Till v0.2.70 is out. Here’s what changed that you’ll actually notice behind the counter — and one fix that matters if your receipts aren’t in English.

A self-order kiosk your customers can use

Put a spare tablet or Pi on the counter and customers can order themselves. This release adds a dine-in / takeaway toggle to the kiosk, so the order carries its type through to the kitchen and the receipt — which is also what decides the VAT rate in several of our markets.

The kiosk’s basket is now fully separate from the cashier’s. Previously a customer tapping through a self-order could collide with a sale being rung up at the till at the same moment. One shop, two people serving, one basket each.

Add a second till without a network engineer

Adding another till used to mean typing addresses. Now the first-boot wizard discovers other tills on your own shop network and asks to join. The existing till shows an approve-or-deny prompt to a manager — pairing is never automatic, so a device on your Wi-Fi can’t quietly join itself to your sales data.

A manual you can actually search

/help is now a two-pane searchable user manual with screenshots that match what you see on your own screen — they’re regenerated per language, so the Turkish manual shows the Turkish interface, not the English one.

Alongside it there’s a 🐞 bug-report button in the navigation. It captures a screenshot of what you were looking at and sends it with the report, so “something looked wrong on the sale screen” turns into something we can fix without a phone call.

Money and paperwork

• Date-ranged Z-reports, downloadable — pick any period rather than just today’s close, for your accountant or your VAT return.
• Named open tabs (Offene Belege) — hold a sale under “table 4” or a customer’s name instead of an anonymous slot.
• Service charge is now its own field, separate from tip, so the two are reported apart where the law treats them differently.
• Pfandrückgabe — manual bottle-deposit cash payouts, for German shops.
• Colour-coded nested category grid on the sale screen: fewer taps to find the thing you sell most.

Fixed: receipts wrapping in the wrong place

Line wrapping on receipts and the customer display counted bytes rather than characters. In English nothing looked wrong. In Turkish, Farsi, German or Chinese, any accented or non-Latin character made the line wrap early and left receipts looking broken. It now counts characters, as it always should have.

Updates on your schedule

There’s an unattended auto-update toggle with a schedule — leave it on and tills update themselves overnight, or turn it off and stay on the version you’ve tested. Your shop, your call.

Installing

Windows has a guided installer and Universal Till opens in its own app window — no terminal, no browser tab. On a Raspberry Pi, a fresh install of the .deb sets up fullscreen kiosk mode automatically on first boot.

Download the latest version — free, and it runs offline. If something in this list doesn’t work the way it reads, use that bug-report button and tell us.