Leaving QuickBooks POS without leaving what you know.
Intuit stopped selling and supporting QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale. No updates, no support, and its payment services switched off. Your data is still yours and still exports. The only question is where it lands.
The vocabulary
Same job, different word.
Most of what your team does every day already exists here. In a lot of cases the only thing that changes is the label above the button.
Department becomes Category
Created automatically as your items import. Nothing to set up first.
Style becomes a variant grid
Attribute down one side, Size across the other, one sellable row per cell. Each cell keeps its own item number, UPC, cost, price and stock.
Vendor becomes Supplier
Purchase order, then receiving, then the supplier invoice and its payment. Invoice status follows the payments and reconciles back to the order.
Physical Inventory becomes Physical count
Count sheet, calculated variance, and an adjustment that writes to the ledger instead of quietly correcting a number.
Store Transfer becomes Branch transfer
Stock in transit sits on its own account until the receiving branch confirms it, so nothing is counted twice or lost between locations.
Charge account becomes Credit account
Credit limit, running balance and statements, with the limit enforced at the till rather than remembered by whoever is serving.
Rewards becomes Loyalty
Tiers and points, applied at the counter. Promotions run on dates instead of being switched on and off by hand.
Financial Exchange becomes Journal export
A journal-entry CSV for QuickBooks Online, or an IIF general journal for QuickBooks Desktop. Your books do not move.
A style stays a style.
This is the part worth getting right. In QuickBooks, paracetamol sold as a card, a packet and a carton is one item with a grid behind it. Flattening that into three unrelated products would be a step backwards, so we kept the grid.
ELSEWHERE
A style export becomes a dozen unrelated products, and the on-hand for every pack piles onto whichever one imported first.
WITH NOSTRA
One product, one row per cell, each with its own item number, UPC, price, stock, batch and expiry.
- Tapping an item stocked in several packs opens a chooser, never a guess
- Scanning a pack’s own barcode skips the chooser and rings that pack
- A card and a carton sit on two cart lines at two prices
- The receipt names the pack the customer walked out with
Stock never flows between packs. Selling a card does not draw down a carton. When staff open a carton to sell packets, that is an inventory adjustment on the ledger, with who did it and when. It is the one habit that keeps a pack-based catalogue honest, and the software insists on it rather than hoping.
Day one
Getting your catalogue across.
Bring the export QuickBooks already writes. No renaming columns, no rearranging a spreadsheet the night before.
Export your inventory
CSV or XLSX, with the columns QuickBooks POS already writes: Item Name, Department, Attribute, Size, Item #, ALU, UPC, Cost, Price, On Hand, Vendor.
Choose QuickBooks POS as the source
We read those column names as written. Styles are recognised by their Attribute and Size columns and grouped back into one product.
Review before anything is written
Every row is checked and shown to you first, warnings called out. Nothing touches live data until someone approves it, and rows that fail are quarantined rather than dropped.
Add your expiry dates
QuickBooks POS has no concept of batch expiry, so your export has none to give. This is the one step that needs a pharmacist rather than a machine, and it is what unlocks expiry alerts, recalls and earliest-expiry-first selling.
Run both for a week
Nothing is switched off on your side while the counts are checked against the shelf. You decide when the old till stops.
QuickBooks keeps the books.
Leaving QuickBooks POS does not mean leaving QuickBooks. Nothing changes for whoever does your accounts, and nobody has to learn a new ledger in the same month they learn a new till.
- Every sale, payment, refund, supplier invoice, transfer and stock movement posts a balanced double entry
- Against a real chart of accounts: revenue, VAT payable, cost of goods sold, inventory asset, receivables
- Export the period as a journal CSV for QuickBooks Online, or an IIF general journal for QuickBooks Desktop
- The chart of accounts exports alongside it, so names line up before the first import
- Sage 50 and Sage Business Cloud too, if the books ever move
Where it goes further
What QuickBooks POS was never built to do.
For a pharmacy these are not conveniences. They are the difference between a general retail till and one that fits the job.
Batches, expiry and FEFO
Stock is held in batches with expiry dates. Every sale draws the earliest-expiring batch first, and an expired batch cannot be sold without an explicit override logged against the person who gave it.
The till keeps working offline
QuickBooks POS stops when the network does. Nostra keeps selling, holds each sale under its own reference and syncs exactly once when the line returns.
Prescription controls
Rx items, controlled drugs and dispensing restrictions are enforced at the point of sale, not remembered by whoever is on the counter.
Nothing financial is deleted
Sales are voided or refunded, never erased. Stock cannot move without a movement row written in the same transaction. Every sensitive action is audited.
It runs in a browser
No workstation licence, no server in the back office, no install on every till. Branches see their own stock; head office sees all of it.
Expiry and low stock find you
Alerts on expiry windows and reorder points, instead of a report somebody has to remember to run on a Friday.
Being straight with you
Four things we do not do yet.
You have just been let down by software that was discontinued. The least we owe you is the list of what is missing, before you sign rather than after.
Price Levels
X and Z reports at close
Gift cards
Layaway
In one line
Your items come across whole, your styles stay styles, and your accountant carries on in QuickBooks.
What you gain is the part QuickBooks POS was never built for: batches, expiry dates, earliest-expiry-first selling, prescription controls, and a till that does not stop when the internet does.