"Sold by weight" sounds like one problem with one answer: buy a scale, wire it to the till. In practice it is four different situations, and three of them never need a scale at the counter at all.
Working out which one you are in saves most people a purchase.
1. Pre-weighed packages: the largest case, and the easiest
If you sell meat from a freezer, this is you. A USDA-processed cut comes back already weighed and labelled with a net weight, and the price is that weight times your rate. The till does not need to weigh anything — it needs to be told a weight and do the arithmetic.
The same is true of a lot of what a farm stand sells: a bag of beans weighed and labelled in the packing shed that morning, a wedge of cheese cut and wrapped before the stand opens.
What to look for in a till: that the weight can be entered per line, that it prints on the receipt as its own field rather than being folded into the item's name, and that two packages of one cut stay two lines. That last one sounds fussy until you sell someone a 1.2 lb steak and a 2.4 lb steak and the till merges them into "2 × steak".
2. Priced by the container
"Fill a quart for $8" is the other model that needs no scale, and at a u-pick it is often the better one — the customer knows the price before they start picking, and nobody queues at a scale.
Mechanically this is not weight pricing at all. A quart is a unit you sell, like an ear of corn or a bunch of dahlias. Any till handles it. The interesting part is what it does to your stock: if you also want to know how much of the field you have picked, you want the till to understand that selling a quart draws a certain amount from the same bin a pint draws from.
3. Keyed weight
Somewhere between the two: the goods are loose, a scale exists in the back, and somebody reads the number and types it in.
The thing that matters here is where the typing happens. A weight field squeezed into a row on a busy screen is a mis-key waiting to happen, especially with cold hands. It wants to be a full-screen pad with big keys — and it wants to be that on a phone, because plenty of stands run on a phone rather than a tablet.
4. A scale at the counter
The fourth rung, and the only one that needs buying anything. Two things distinguish a good implementation from a frustrating one:
The reading should be the weight display, not a number you copy. If the screen shows a scale reading in one place and an empty box in another, someone will eventually type the wrong thing.
Tare has to be first-class. At a u-pick, customers bring their own tub. Weigh the tub, zero it, fill it, and the till should show what came off — and the receipt should print net weight, unit price and the tare as their own fields.
Practically: a scale with a serial port and a Bluetooth or USB link is the common shape. Scales speak several different protocols, so check what your till actually reads before you buy — "has a serial port" is not the same as "will talk to this software", and the honest answer from any vendor is a specific protocol name rather than a shrug.
Your scale and the rules where you sell are your own business to sort out, the same way your sales-tax registration is. We make no claim about certification in either direction, and anyone who tells you the rules are simpler than they are is guessing.
Where the stock count fits
This is the part people discover late. If the till knows you sold 1.34 lb, it can take 1.34 lb off the bin — not one "unit" of something.
That matters when you sell the same pool more than one way. A bin of blueberries picked this morning, sold as pints, quarts and flats: each sale should draw the right amount out of the same bin, so what is left is a real number rather than three unrelated counters.
It also matters for the reverse. Sell a product per ear and stock it in pounds, and the till needs to know that one ear takes half a pound. Get that wrong and your counts drift from the first sale onward.
How TallyTill does it
All four rungs, on every plan including the free one.
- Price per pound, kilo, ounce or gram, and the till opens a full-screen pad — built for a phone first.
- Pre-weighed packages need no scale at the counter. Read the label, key it, done.
- Two packages of one cut stay two lines, at their own weights. They are never merged.
- A scale over USB or Bluetooth becomes the weight display, with tare for the customer's container. It reads standard NCI / SCP-01 scales — check yours speaks that before buying. Not on iPad; we have no iOS build.
- The receipt prints net weight, the unit price and the tare as their own fields.
- Sell in one unit, count in another — a bin held in pounds, sold by the ear, with the conversion done once and used by the till, the stock record and the report alike.
- One tile, several sizes — pint, quart and flat behind one button, each drawing the right amount from the same picked bin.
Two limits, stated rather than discovered: a weighed line is never redeemable against a ticket or wristband, and we do not read price-embedded or weight-embedded barcodes — the kind a supermarket scale prints onto a label. If your goods arrive with those, that is a real gap.