Frequently Asked Questions

UniSight is a retail management platform built for independent grocery stores and supermarkets. It combines the GroPOS point of sale, the oneStore inventory app, the oneTime employee time clock, onePay payment processing, and a cloud back office that covers accounting, purchasing, scheduling, dashboards, and reports. It was built by food retail operators with 40+ years of combined experience running their own stores.

The UniSight suite includes GroPOS (point-of-sale software installed on Windows or Linux touchscreen registers), oneStore (an Android app for receiving, price tags, and inventory work on the floor), oneTime (an Android time-clock kiosk with NFC badge punches), onePay (the payment app that runs on PAX terminals, paired with UniSight merchant services), the UniSight Platform (the cloud back office with dashboards, accounting, inventory, scheduling, and reports), UniSight TV (an Apple TV dashboard app), oneScan (a countertop kiosk that digitizes paper invoices), and oneServer (an on-site service that connects electronic shelf labels, scales, and label printers). oneTeam, an employee app for iOS and Android, is in development.

Both, on purpose. The UniSight back office is a cloud service hosted on Microsoft Azure and used from a web browser, so owners can check the store from anywhere. GroPOS, the register software, is installed locally on each terminal and keeps the full product catalog and pricing in a local database, so checkout keeps working through internet outages and syncs continuously with the cloud. The accurate description is a cloud-connected, offline-first system—the register is not a browser app.

UniSight accounts support multiple branches. Users who belong to more than one location choose a branch at login, roles and permissions are scoped per branch, and the Admin role works across all branches. Dashboards and reports are per-branch today: there is no consolidated cross-store rollup view yet, so owners review each location's numbers one branch at a time.

GroPOS ships its register interface in 12 languages—English, Arabic, Spanish, Farsi, French, Hindi, Armenian, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Chinese—with separate language selection for the cashier screen and the customer-facing display. The oneTime time clock supports English, Armenian, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian, including right-to-left layout for Arabic. The oneTeam employee app supports English and Spanish. The web back office is in English.

Accountable is Profitable is UniSight's operating philosophy: food retail rarely fails from lack of effort—it fails because small, repeated operational errors compound faster than thin margins can absorb them. UniSight enforces a verifiable loop from purchase order to receiving to invoice to payment to sale, so costs are current, pricing is defensible, and exceptions surface instead of hiding in volume. In the grocery store where UniSight was built and battle-tested, this approach produced a tenfold increase in net profit.

The UniSight Core suite starts at $199 per month when you use onePay merchant services for payment processing, or $299 per month if you keep your own payment processor. Every location receives a custom estimate based on its registers, employees, and optional services. There are no per-transaction fees for the software.

The Core suite includes GroPOS (point of sale), oneStore (inventory), oneTime (time and attendance), and onePay (payment processing), together with access to the UniSight cloud back office. Each location gets a custom estimate, and you add registers, employees, locations, and optional services as your business grows.

No. UniSight does not charge per-transaction fees for its software—the monthly fee stays predictable regardless of how many transactions you ring up. Standard payment processing rates still apply through onePay merchant services or through your own processor.

Yes. UniSight offers hardware leasing starting at $45 per month, so a store can put in new registers, payment terminals, or kiosks without a large upfront purchase. GroPOS also supports a broad list of existing equipment—see the Hardware & Equipment section for the supported printer, scanner, scale, and terminal brands.

Yes, in depth. Every product in GroPOS carries a SNAP-eligibility flag, and the payment screen shows the SNAP-eligible total for the order. GroPOS accepts both EBT Food and EBT Cash tenders, automatically handles partial EBT approvals by updating the remaining balance, supports split payments that combine EBT with other tenders, and lets cashiers run an EBT balance check that prints a balance receipt for the customer.

onePay is UniSight's payment application that runs on PAX Android payment terminals—the S300, A30, A35, A920, and Aries8 models. It connects the point of sale to card processing through the PAX POS Link SDK and handles sale, return, void, cancel, and balance-inquiry transactions for credit, debit, EBT Food, and EBT Cash. onePay pairs with UniSight's merchant services program, which is how the Core suite reaches its $199 per month price.

Yes, by design. onePay exposes a documented JSON-over-TCP integration protocol with a published POS Integration Guide, so any point-of-sale system—not just GroPOS—can drive PAX payment terminals through it. The protocol covers sales, returns, voids, EBT Food and EBT Cash with balance inquiry, and split payments for the SNAP-eligible portion of a basket, and connections are secured with mutual TLS.

GroPOS is UniSight's point-of-sale application for independent grocery stores. It is installed software for Windows and Linux touchscreen registers (full-screen at 1920x1080), and it drives the store's barcode scanners, certified scales, receipt printers, PAX payment terminals, cash drawers, and coin dispensers. Each register keeps the full product catalog and pricing in a local database and syncs transactions, catalog, pricing, employees, and settings with the UniSight cloud for its store branch.

GroPOS accepts cash, credit, debit, EBT Food, and EBT Cash, including split payments that combine multiple tenders in one transaction and automatic handling of partial EBT approvals. Cashiers can run EBT balance checks that print a balance receipt, and a payment in progress can be cancelled. Card and EBT payments run on PAX payment terminals through UniSight's onePay application. A single tender is limited to $10,000.

GroPOS reads the connected certified scale live, with a stability indicator, and only captures stable weights. It automatically subtracts container (tare) weight, supports weight-embedded barcodes from deli scales, records a gross, tare, and net weight audit trail for every weighed line, and offers manual weight entry as a fallback if the scale is down. The weighing flow is designed to NIST Handbook 44 weights-and-measures rules.

GroPOS reads UPC-A, EAN-13, GS1 DataBar Expanded, GS1-128, GS1 QR, GS1 DataMatrix, and PLU codes, plus price-embedded, weight-embedded, and quantity-embedded barcodes in both legacy in-store and GS1 Application Identifier formats. Barcode profiles are configurable per store, so existing in-store label formats keep scanning.

Every price, tax, discount, CRV deposit, and tender allocation in GroPOS is computed by the GroPOS Pricing Engine—a deterministic engine written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly that uses integer-cent arithmetic, never floating point. The same engine binary runs at the register and in the UniSight cloud backend, so a cart priced at checkout matches the back office to the cent. Every pricing decision is written to a tamper-evident SHA-256 hash-chained audit log retained for 365 days, and the engine is validated by 77 certification test scenarios. GroPOS maintains a NIST Handbook 44 compliance program, and an NTEP certification application is in progress.

GroPOS supports sale prices, per-line percentage discounts, and transaction-wide invoice discounts from 1 to 99 percent. Every discount requires manager PIN approval, and per-item floor prices stop anyone from selling below a configured minimum—protection that holds even when a manager is approving quickly during a rush.

Returns start by scanning the receipt barcode or searching by date, payment type, or the last four card digits. The cashier selects the items, assigns reason codes, and refunds to cash or the original card, with manager approval required. Voids also require manager approval. Transactions can be held under a name and recalled later, and a cash-only sale can be pulled back for correction within 3 minutes of completion.

Cashiers are assigned a till at login, chosen from a list or by scanning the till barcode, and drawer openings are tracked. Cash pickups move excess cash out of the drawer with a printed receipt, vendor payouts from the drawer are recorded against invoice numbers, and manager PIN approval is required for pickups, payouts, and end-of-shift sign-out. Cashiers sign in with a PIN or NFC badge, with rate limiting and lockout, and security events are logged.

Yes. Age-restricted items trigger manual 18+ or 21+ verification prompts or a driver's license scan. CRV (California Redemption Value) bottle deposits are applied automatically, and regulated checkout bag fees are calculated from built-in state and locality rule matrices—so compliance fees are systematic instead of left to cashier memory.

During checkout the customer display shows the live order list, item-level savings, subtotal, tax, and total, the SNAP-eligible amount of the order, and change due. When the lane is idle it rotates store advertisements—images or videos you load yourself—turning the screen into in-store ad space.

GroPOS keeps selling. The full product catalog and pricing live in a local database on each register, so cashiers keep ringing up cash sales and receipts always print. Completed sales are stored locally and automatically retried every 30 minutes until they sync. Cashiers can even unlock the register offline using a cached copy of their PIN after their first online login. The honest limits: card and EBT payments require connectivity, returns need a connection for transaction lookup, and after a configurable 8-hour offline window the register asks to reconnect before continuing.

It depends on the product, and we would rather be precise than catchy. GroPOS is offline-first: cash checkout, receipts, and the local catalog work without internet, while card and EBT payments need a connection. The UniSight back office, dashboards, and reports are cloud services that require internet. The oneTime time clock posts punches live and needs a network connection to record them. The oneTeam employee app caches schedule and profile data for about 24 hours of offline viewing. Because most payments are card-based, we recommend a cellular backup connection at each location.

GroPOS degrades gracefully instead of stopping the lane. If a device fails to initialize, the register stays usable—cashiers can fall back to manual weight entry and cash-only sales—and scanners and scales reconnect automatically with exponential backoff once they come back.

Often, yes—but we check rather than promise. GroPOS supports a broad, specific list of equipment: receipt printers from Epson, Star Micronics, Bixolon, Citizen, Seiko, PartnerTech, and Volcora plus generic ESC/POS printers; Datalogic scanners and scanner-scales; CAS scales; PAX payment terminals; standard cash drawers; and Telequip coin dispensers. During onboarding we assess your current setup against that list, because arbitrary legacy hardware is not guaranteed to work.

Receipt printers: Epson (including the TM-T88VII), Star Micronics (TSP143IV, TSP100III, TSP650II, mC-Print3, SP700), Bixolon, Citizen, Seiko, PartnerTech, Volcora, and generic ESC/POS printers over USB, serial, or network. Scanners and scales: Datalogic scanners and scanner-scales, including the Magellan with built-in scale, plus CAS serial scales. Cash drawers connect through the printer or directly over serial, Telequip T-Flex coin dispensers are supported, and the PartnerTech X2 all-in-one touchscreen terminal is supported as a complete register.

UniSight integrates with four electronic shelf label brands—Bizerba, Opticon, Cedar, and Zkong—through oneServer, the on-site service that bridges the UniSight cloud to in-store hardware. Price changes made in the back office flow out to the shelf labels, so the shelf, the register, and the back office stay on the same number.

Only for certain hardware integrations. The platform is cloud-hosted and GroPOS registers sync directly to it. If you use electronic shelf labels, price-computing deli scales, or in-store label printing, a small Windows service called oneServer runs on-site to bridge them: it talks to Bizerba, Opticon, Cedar, and Zkong shelf labels, Bizerba and Hobart scales, and SATO and Epson printers. oneServer registers itself with a QR code, checks in about every minute, and keeps itself updated with a companion updater service.

Every UniSight device—registers, tablets, scanners, kiosks—is activated by QR code, sends heartbeats so its online status and software version show on the dashboard, and can be remotely logged out. The apps update themselves: oneTime downloads updates and verifies each package against its SHA-256 hash before installing, oneScan checks for updates every 12 hours and never interrupts an active scanning session, and oneServer has a dedicated updater service. No on-site IT staff required.

oneStore is UniSight's Android app for inventory work on the store floor—despite the name, it is not an online storefront. Staff use it to receive vendor shipments against purchase orders, process returns to vendor, work through pending price changes, print price tags on mobile label printers, validate shelf tags against current prices, link and unlink electronic shelf labels, and look up any product's details and stock by scanning its barcode. oneStore is Android-only today; there is no iPhone version.

Staff pick the vendor and purchase order, then scan incoming items against the vendor's catalog. The app records received quantities and discrepancy reasons, supports partial deliveries, and lets staff photograph products that are not in the catalog. The finished receiving report—photos included—is submitted to UniSight, where it links to the purchase order and the vendor's invoice in accounting.

Price changes made in the UniSight back office appear in oneStore as pending pricing events. Staff generate the affected tags, choose a tag template and printer, print, and mark the event complete. A separate Validate Tags mode lets staff scan shelf tags to confirm they match current prices, and any product's tags can be reprinted on the spot by scanning it. Price edits themselves happen in the back office, not on the handheld.

oneStore prints price tags on Zebra label printers through the Zebra Link-OS SDK and on Seiko Instruments (SII) label printers. Printers pair over Bluetooth with NFC tap-to-connect, and staff can preview tags as a PDF in the app before printing.

No. oneStore scans barcodes with the device camera using Google ML Kit and also includes camera-based text recognition (OCR). A compatible Android phone or handheld works on the floor without extra scanning hardware.

Yes. oneStore records shrink with reason codes, transfers stock between zones such as sales floor, backroom, cooler, and freezer, makes stock adjustments, and runs per-product stock lookups. Returns to vendor are built item by item with reason codes and photo attachments, then submitted for processing.

Yes. oneScan is a compact countertop kiosk—built on a Raspberry Pi with an Epson ES-400II document scanner—where an employee taps an NFC badge and feeds in paper invoices. The kiosk removes blank pages, corrects page orientation, compresses the scan to PDF, and uploads it with employee traceability. UniSight's Invoice Intelligence Engine then reads the scan with OCR and AI extraction and creates a draft invoice in the system automatically, so paper invoices become structured data without manual keying.

Employees walk up to the oneTime kiosk tablet and tap their NFC badge on the attached badge reader. The screen confirms who they are, shows the valid actions for their current status—clock in, clock out, start break, end break—and records the punch with a timestamp and the device that captured it. A branch can optionally allow manual badge-ID entry on an on-screen keypad, but that option is off by default.

oneTime runs on Android tablets (Android 8.1 or newer) set up as wall-mounted or countertop kiosks, paired with an external NFC or RFID badge reader that works in keyboard-emulation mode. The app starts automatically when the tablet boots and keeps itself updated, so it suits unattended, always-on operation. Stores can run multiple kiosks: devices discover each other on the local network, and a punch on one kiosk refreshes the others immediately.

Each punch requires the employee's own NFC badge, and manual ID entry is disabled unless a branch explicitly turns it on. When schedule adherence is enabled, unscheduled or out-of-window punches are blocked until a manager taps their own badge to approve—and manager approval never accepts manual entry. Every clock event records which physical device captured it and cannot be edited once recorded.

Managers create shifts in UniSight, and the oneTime kiosk pulls the schedule from the cloud. With schedule adherence enabled, the kiosk checks every clock-in against the scheduled start and every clock-out against the scheduled end, within a configurable buffer window, honoring the branch's timezone and overnight shifts. A punch outside the schedule requires a manager's badge approval on the spot, in person at the clock.

Yes. Breaks are tracked separately from clock-in and clock-out, and every shift carries regular paid minutes, overtime minutes, break minutes, and late minutes, calculated server-side by the UniSight platform. The kiosk dashboard shows each employee's live status: on clock, on break, scheduled, unscheduled, off clock, or late.

oneTime feeds every punch into the UniSight platform, which computes the regular, overtime, break, and late minutes that payroll runs on and keeps payroll records with confirmed pay runs in its accounting module. There is no direct integration with third-party payroll providers today—the honest description is that oneTime produces payroll-ready hours inside UniSight.

oneTeam is UniSight's upcoming employee app for iPhone (iOS 15 and later) and Android (6.0 and later), currently in pre-release. At launch it is deliberately view-only: employees see today's shift with a live countdown and break times, their monthly schedule, their clock-in and clock-out history, the weekly availability their manager has set, today's assigned tasks, and a Paging inbox for receive-only messages from managers. Not in version 1: clocking in or out, shift swapping, time-off requests, and sending messages. It supports English and Spanish and caches schedule data for about 24 hours of offline viewing.

The dashboard is the first screen after login and shows real-time widgets for today's transactions, who is on duty, active cashiers and till cash, gross profit with cost-of-goods breakdown, top-selling items, department performance, cashier discounts, and vendor payouts, plus a quick grid of core numbers—total sales, unique products sold, customer count, and dollars per ticket—each compared against the prior period. Dashboards are per-branch: multi-store owners view one location at a time.

UniSight ships 15 alert types in the dashboard notification feed. Sales: sales above average, transaction average, and transaction ratio. Margin and pricing: low margin, cost increase, price below market, and price changes. Cash: cash pickup, on-hand cash low, till depleted, and open checkouts. Labor: schedule incomplete, team member delayed, team member in overtime, and team member unavailable. These are rule-based operational alerts; UniSight does not currently offer inventory-level or out-of-stock alerts.

UniSight has a built-in accounting suite rather than an export to outside bookkeeping software: financial accounts for tills, safes, bank accounts, and petty cash with adjustments and transfers; a general ledger; check writing with printing, voiding, and reissue under check-number control; payroll records with confirmed runs; vendor invoices linked to purchase orders and receiving reports; recurring bills and service providers; B2B client accounts; owner draws and investments; and an end-of-shift till closeout workflow with manager approval.

UniSight integrates with Plaid, so you can link your store's bank accounts and pull live balances directly into the accounting module. Statement-level automatic reconciliation is not part of the product today; balances, the general ledger, and manual adjustments and transfers are the working tools.

Standard reports include Category Sales, Detailed Daily, Sales, Sales Tax, Money, and Profit and Loss, plus inventory, employee, customer, and purchase-order reports. Report access is permission-gated, so you choose which roles can see them.

Yes. UniSight TV is an Apple TV app (tvOS 17 and later, on Apple TV HD and 4K) built for always-on wall-mounted screens in the office or back room. It shows today's live store pulse across 10 widgets—team on duty, cashiers, core KPIs, transactions, dollars per ticket, top items, gross profit, department performance, discounts, and vendor payouts—with each widget's refresh interval configurable from 1 to 60 minutes.

Yes, through the Kitchen Production module, licensed per branch. You define recipes with ingredient costing, then record production batches that deduct the ingredients from inventory and add the finished goods—so the cost of a tray of baklava or a batch of marinated meat is known, not guessed. Production records can be reversed if a batch is logged in error.

The UniSight platform runs on Microsoft Azure with HTTPS-only traffic in production. Every in-store device is activated by QR code, holds its own per-device API key, and can be remotely logged out. User sessions use JWT tokens with permissions enforced server-side. At the register, GroPOS requires PIN or NFC badge login with rate limiting and lockout, logs security events, and writes every pricing decision to a tamper-evident SHA-256 hash-chained audit log kept for 365 days. The UniSight TV app stores its tokens in the device Keychain and pins its certificates.

You build custom roles from a permission tree that covers every feature in UniSight, GroPOS, and the companion apps, with View, Add, Edit, and Delete granularity plus specialized actions like Approve, Pay, Void, and Transfer. Roles are branch-scoped, a built-in Admin role spans all branches, and features a user lacks permission for are hidden from their navigation automatically. Each device type—GroPOS, oneStore, oneTime, oneScan, oneServer—has its own API permission scope.

Not yet, and we will not claim it before it is granted. GroPOS is built to NIST Handbook 44 requirements—deterministic pricing engine, stable-weight enforcement on certified scales, and a maintained compliance evidence program—and an NTEP certification application (Electronic Cash Register Interfaced with Scale) is in progress with NCWM. Until certification is granted, the accurate statement is that GroPOS is designed and tested to NTEP requirements.

Card and PIN entry happen on the PAX payment terminal through the PAX POS Link SDK's secure channel. UniSight's onePay application orchestrates the transaction flow rather than handling raw card data, and its backend connections use mutual TLS. Ask us directly for current compliance documentation for your processor setup.

Software deployment itself can be completed in as little as one day. Most stores are fully operational within 1 to 2 weeks end to end—the difference is hardware ordering lead time, data migration (products, pricing, and vendors), installation, and staff training, scheduled around your store hours to keep the lanes open.

UniSight has data import capabilities for NCR systems and for Cash Register Express (CRE), and the implementation team handles product, pricing, and vendor data migration as part of onboarding. If you run a different legacy system, ask—migration is scoped during your custom estimate.

Support is included with your subscription: phone and email support, implementation assistance, staff training, and ongoing updates. Cashiers also get help where they stand: GroPOS has a searchable in-app help menu, a one-tap request-assistance function that pages for manager assistance, bagging, stock checks, or cleanup, and the support line—1-888-294-6414—appears right on the register if a sync problem needs a human.

Updates require no on-site IT. The cloud back office updates automatically. GroPOS registers receive catalog, pricing, settings, and software updates through a heartbeat sync pipeline. oneTime time clocks download updates and verify each package against its SHA-256 hash before installing. oneScan kiosks check for updates every 12 hours and wait for active scanning sessions to finish. oneServer has a dedicated companion updater service.