Point of Sale turns a tablet at your front desk or snack bar into a self-serve shop. Admins stock a product catalog from inside Deskie, members buy from a public kiosk page, and every purchase is added to the buyer's next monthly invoice. There is no cash drawer and no card terminal to manage. Members identify themselves with a 6-digit kiosk PIN (or their email and password), the items are charged to their account, and the charge is swept onto their invoice the same way print jobs, passes, and event tickets are. Point of Sale is currently labeled Beta in the admin app.
How it fits together
There are two surfaces:
- The admin catalog at Point of Sale in your admin app. This is where you create products, set prices, track stock, and review orders and activity. It requires an admin role.
- The kiosk at /public/pos. This is the public, session-free page you put on the tablet at the shop. Anyone can browse it, but a purchase requires the buyer to prove who they are with a kiosk PIN or their email and password.
Because the kiosk lives under your public site, the workspace is identified by the subdomain. You do not log the tablet into anything. You just open the kiosk page and leave it on.
Setting up the catalog
Open Point of Sale from the admin navigation. The page has three tabs: Products, Orders, and Activity. To add an item, create a new product and fill in its details.
- Name. The product name shown on the kiosk card, for example "Cold Brew" or "Protein Bar".
- Price. The unit price. This is what the member is charged per item.
- Quantity. The on-hand stock count. Deskie decrements this automatically on every sale, and the kiosk hides any product that has reached zero.
- Low stock threshold. When a sale drops stock to or below this number, Deskie emails and pushes a one-time low-stock alert to your admins. The alert does not repeat until you raise the stock again, so you are not spammed on every later sale.
- Category. A free-text label such as "Beverages" or "Snacks". It shows as a badge on the product card and can be used to search and filter the kiosk.
- SKU. An optional stock-keeping unit if you track one.
- Description. An optional public description shown on the kiosk product card.
- Image. An optional product photo, uploaded and stored per workspace.
- Notes. An internal staff note. This is never shown on the kiosk.
Products have an active switch. Only active products with stock remaining appear on the kiosk, so you can take an item off the shelf without deleting its history. Every product also carries a Transaction History panel that logs when it was created, activated or deactivated, had its price or quantity adjusted, was sold, or triggered a low-stock warning.
The kiosk and kiosk PINs
The kiosk PIN is a 6-digit numeric code that lets a member ring themselves up without typing a password. It is the primary way buyers identify themselves at the tablet. A few things to know about PINs:
- A PIN must be exactly 6 digits and must be unique within your workspace, since the kiosk identifies the member by PIN alone.
- PINs are stored as a one-way hash and are never displayed back. Members and admins can only set, overwrite, or clear a PIN, not view it.
- Members set or change their own PIN from their account settings. Changing an existing PIN requires entering the current one, the same way a password change works.
- Admins can set or clear a member's PIN from the member's edit page. This is the recovery path when someone forgets theirs.
- If a member checks out with email and password instead of a PIN, the kiosk offers a quick "set a PIN" nudge right after the purchase so they can skip the password next time.
To put the shop in service, open Open Kiosk from the Products tab (or browse to /public/pos on your public site) and leave it open on the tablet.
Ringing up a sale
On the kiosk, the member browses the product grid, optionally searches or filters by category, and adds items to a running cart on the right. Quantities can be increased or decreased per line. When they are ready, they confirm the purchase and prove who they are:
- Enter a kiosk PIN (the default), or
- Enter email and password as a fallback.
Deskie verifies the identity, then validates the order on the server. Prices and stock are always recomputed on the server, so the kiosk display can never be tampered with to change a price. Stock is decremented atomically: if two people race for the last item, only one sale goes through and the other is told to adjust their cart. Paused or inactive members cannot check out. To protect a public tablet, every failed identity check returns the same generic message, so the kiosk cannot be used to probe which PINs or emails exist.
After a successful checkout the member sees a short "Thanks" confirmation telling them the amount was added to their next invoice, and the cart resets for the next customer.
Payment and billing
Point of Sale does not take a card at the tablet. Instead, each completed checkout becomes an order that is billed to the member's account and added to their next monthly invoice. This is the same accrual pattern Deskie uses for print jobs, passes, and event tickets: the charge accrues now and the scheduled monthly sweep rolls it into the member's combined invoice as its own line item, described by what was bought (for example "Cold Brew x2, Protein Bar x1"). To learn how that invoice is assembled and collected, see Invoices and Payments and ACH.
A few billing details worth knowing:
- Team billing. If the buyer's account is billed to a team, the purchase is routed to that team's payer, exactly like every other accrued charge.
- Credits. If the member has an account credit balance, the confirm dialog shows a toggle to apply it. Credits are applied to the order, and if they fully cover it the order is settled on the spot and skipped by the monthly sweep. Any remainder is what lands on the next invoice.
- Snapshots. Each order line stores the product name and unit price at the moment of sale, so your order history stays accurate even after you later edit or remove a product.
Reviewing orders and activity
Back in the admin catalog, the Orders tab lists every kiosk checkout with who bought what and the total, and the Activity tab shows the rolling log of catalog changes, sales, and low-stock warnings across all products. Each individual product page also carries its own transaction history so you can audit a single item end to end.
Notes and limits
- Point of Sale is in Beta. The flow described here is live, with more kiosk features (such as check-ins and instant bookings sharing the same PIN) planned over time.
- The kiosk only sells to people who already have an account in your workspace, since the charge has to land on a member's invoice. It is built for member and guest self-checkout, not for walk-in cash sales.
- Stock is a simple on-hand count per product. There is no multi-location stock split today.