The TallyTill back office grew significantly this year. When it launched, it was a self-checkout: a phone or tablet that let a customer ring themselves up and pay by card, tap, or QR code. That's still the heart of it. But a checkout that only takes money leaves you doing everything else — counting stock, pricing by weight, tracking what sold where — on paper or in a spreadsheet.
So the quiet half of the product has now shipped. The till now has a back office behind it. This is an honest tour of what shipped, written the way we'd want someone evaluating us to read it: what it does and how it works.
The short version: one sale now touches a lot more
When it first launched, a sale took payment and stopped. Today the same tap sets off a chain of small, correct things behind the counter — and because it's a self-serve till, all of it happens with nobody standing there.
Here's the walk-through, area by area.
Shares first: meat, animals, and CSA
Two whole selling models shipped this year that a plain checkout simply can't do.
Meat and animal shares. Describe an animal lot in your own words and track the portions remaining. Price two honest ways: a fixed price per option, or a per-pound (or per-kilo) rate charged on hanging weight. Members request a share on your farm page and you confirm it; the till builds cut sheets and a processor list and tracks collection day.
A full CSA season. Set up seasonal share plans, pickup sites, and a member sign-up page. Members sign in without a password to see their box and balance, pay online or at the stand, and — if you allow it — swap items or place a hold. The box builder fills each week's boxes from member preferences; pack day gives you sign-in sheets, pick lists, and pack lists per site; and a tablet at the drop site scans box labels and hands them over.
Real-time visibility: reporting and notifications
Stock and sales movements are useless without sight into them.
- A daily low-stock email, opt-in, that names what's low and what's gone, so the restock run is a list instead of a drive-and-guess. (It's one email a day at most, and it only fires when something's actually low.)
- A stock report showing on-hand, what it's worth at retail value, when each item last sold, and what isn't moving. (It's retail value — what the shelf would ring up — not a cost-based valuation.)
- An append-only movement ledger. Every sale, count, transfer, and adjustment carries a reason, a note, and the person who did it. When a count looks wrong, you read the ledger instead of guessing.
Knowing what you have: the inventory back office
This is the biggest change. The till used to have no idea what was on the table; "sold out" was a customer telling you. Now:
- Per-product stock counts down as things sell — on the shelf and locally between syncs, so it stays right even offline. A sold-out product is dimmed and stamped on the grid. The system is built to be realistic: the cached count can be a few minutes stale and the customer holding the jar is not — if stock looks low but a customer has the item in hand, the sale goes through. Negative stock is allowed and shown on purpose; it's information, not an error.
Locations, bundles, sizes, and a second price list
Four capabilities that turn a single catalog into something a real operation can use:
- Multiple locations. The shed, the farm, and the market booth each hold their own stock, and each till sells from one of them. Transfers move stock between locations with both legs recorded, so neither count drifts.
- Bundles. A gift box or a combo sells as one tile and quietly deducts each component from the shelf. The till even derives "can make 12" from the weakest part. (A bundle is never itself stocked — it's defined by its parts.)
- Sizes. One tile, several sizes — pint, quart, flat — each with its own price and its own count, or all drawing from one shared pool. The customer sees "from $6.00" and picks.
- A second price list for wholesale. A restaurant or reseller account is a switch at the counter, behind the manager PIN, instead of mental arithmetic. (It's a separate price, not a discount off retail — retail is the catalog price.)
Selling by weight, with a scale or without one
Produce, honey, meat by the cut, soil by the scoop — anything with no fixed weight can now be sold by the pound or kilo:
- Type the weight off the package label — no scale to buy, which covers most freezer-meat and farm-stand cases out of the box.
- Or connect a USB or Bluetooth scale you already own, with the reading used as the live weight.
- And a preset container weight so the customer pays for the honey, not the jar — set once on the product, applied automatically, and it holds even at an unattended stand.
Switching over without recounting
If you're coming from another system, the importer brings your catalog and your counts from Square, Shopify, QuickBooks, and WooCommerce (and a plain, clearly-labelled spreadsheet). A product you already count keeps your number — the preview says "kept your count" before anything is written.
Here's what changed, job by job
The clearest way to see it is the before-and-after. The "was blocked by" column is what the product actually did; the "now" column is what shipped.
| If you run… | Was blocked by | Now |
|---|---|---|
| A self-serve farm stand | Produce has no barcode and no fixed weight; nothing knew what was on the table | Sell by weight, per-product stock with a sold-out tile, a daily low-stock email, and backdated harvest intake |
| A micro-market or honor box | "How much am I losing?" had no data behind it | A movement ledger with an actor on every row, and a low-stock list for the restock run |
| A market booth and a walk-in | One pool of stock, no idea what sold where | Locations with recorded transfers; each till sells from its own location |
| A nursery or garden centre | Soil by the scoop, mulch by the yard, no barcodes | A dimensioned catalog (weight, volume, length, count) and a selling unit that differs from the stocking unit |
| A CSA pickup shed | A box is eight things, and nothing could count them down | Bundles that draw down components, plus per-location stock |
And the till finally talks to your other software
The longest-standing gap is closed: there's now an API with keys for reading or adjusting stock, plus signed webhooks that fire on stock and sales events. If you run accounting or an online store beside the till, it no longer lives on an island.
See it on your own stand
The honest pitch is simple: TallyTill is still the self-checkout it always was — a customer rings themselves up and pays on a phone or tablet you already own — but it's no longer only that. The back office caught up with the till.
The entry plan is free, with no card required, and the inventory, ledger, locations, bundles, sizes, scales, shares, and API above are on every plan — there's no "advanced inventory" tier to climb to.
- Create your free account and import your catalog to see your own counts come across.
- Compare what each plan includes on the pricing page.
- Browse the deep-dive guides — stock, shares, selling by weight, switching systems — in the resource library.