Every nursery POS system answers the same two questions, and most of them answer both in a way built for someone much bigger than you.
"My plants don't have barcodes." → Print 400 tags. "I sell mulch and soil in bulk." → Put in a certified scale.
Both answers are written for a garden center with a receiving dock and a staffer whose whole job is the item file. If you're a grower selling under $100,000 a year — which the USDA's 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties puts at 61% of all U.S. horticulture operations (the full breakdown is here) — you are not a smaller version of that business. You have forty people in the hoop house on the second Saturday in May and a folding table between them and the parking lot. You need to ring a plant in four seconds without having touched it beforehand, and you need to sell a scoop of soil without buying a scale.
Here's what a nursery POS actually needs to be.
Plants: price bands, not four hundred SKUs
You grow three hundred varieties. You do not have three hundred prices — you have about eight. A 4-inch annual, a 1-gallon perennial, a 2-gallon shrub, a hanging basket, a flat of six, bagged soil, a specimen tree. Build your catalog as price bands first and it's an afternoon, not a week. Checkout becomes "1-gal perennial ×3," the math is right, the tax is right, the card goes through — which is most of the value.
For the plant in someone's hands that has no code, you get three ways into the cart: tap it off the screen from photo tiles, snap a photo and let AI match it against your own catalog, or scan a barcode where one exists. That whole no-barcode workflow — and the honest limits of photo recognition, which is great at telling a fern from a mulch bag but will not separate two boxwood cultivars in identical black pots — is worth reading in full in how to ring up plants that don't have barcodes. It's the deepest guide we have on the topic.
Bulk soil, mulch, and gravel: the unit is the SKU
This is the part the plant guides skip, so here's the honest mechanic.
TallyTill is not a scale, and it does not price by weight or by measured volume. There's no per-pound or per-cubic-yard computation. What works instead — and works well — is to make the unit you actually sell into a priced product:
a scoop of mulch · a half-yard of topsoil · a full cubic yard · a filled 5-gallon bucket · a bag of compost · a pickup-bed load
Each is a tile with a price. The customer pulls up, you tap "cubic yard of mulch ×2," and it rings like anything else. Bulk pricing at a small nursery is almost always sold in these fixed scoops and loads anyway — the loader operator isn't weighing each bucket — so pricing by the unit matches how the sale really happens. If you genuinely sell by certified weight, you'll want a scale beside the till and a set of priced weight tiers to tap; TallyTill won't be the thing doing the weighing.
The greenhouse with no signal
Hoop houses and back lots are bad for connectivity, so it's worth knowing what still works. Barcode and QR scanning is local to the device. Sales are captured on the tablet and sync when it's back in range. The AI photo match is the one online-only piece — it sends a photo to a server — so in a dead zone you lean on tiles and barcodes. Whether you can take a card offline comes down to your reader, which we cover in card payments when the internet goes down.
What it costs, and getting started
We publish pricing plainly on the pricing page rather than routing you through a quote call, and TallyTill runs on the phone or tablet you already own — no proprietary terminal. If your spring sale or fall festival charges admission, entry passes and printed wristbands can be switched on in settings too.
Keep reading
- How to ring up plants that don't have barcodes — the flagship no-barcode guide, with the real limits of photo recognition
- Orchard checkout software: pricing by the bag, the peck, or the pound — the same price-band thinking for fruit
- Farmers market POS: selling off-grid when the booth has no signal — take the catalog on the road
You can put your price bands and bulk units in and take a real sale today — start free, no card and no time limit.