Retail & Chain Stores
Branches on one stock ledger, an offline till, cashier shifts, offers and reward points.
A single shop can be run from a cash register and a notebook. A chain cannot, and what breaks first is never the selling — it is everything around it: the promotion that ran differently at two branches, the transfer that left one warehouse and never arrived at the other, the drawer that came up short on a Thursday, and the customer who wants to return in Riyadh what they bought in Jeddah. Nama runs the counter and the company on the same records, so a branch is a dimension on the stock, the price list, the offer and the ledger rather than a separate installation that has to be reconciled at month end.
The modules this sector leans on
Shared with every other Nama customer — configured for how you work.
- Point of Sale — Registers That Keep Selling Offline Retail terminals that keep selling offline, on a local database, with shift control.
- Sales — Quotation to Collection, With the Price Explained Quotations, orders, delivery and invoicing under pricing, discount and credit rules.
- Inventory Management — Quantity, Value and Where It Actually Is Multi-warehouse stock, lots, serials, stocktakes and the cost behind every movement.
- E-Commerce Integration — Salla, Zid, Magento, Shopify and Amazon Online stores and marketplaces kept in step with stock, prices and orders.
- ZATCA E-Invoicing (Saudi Arabia) Saudi Phase 2 integration — UBL 2.1 invoices, cryptographic stamps and QR codes.
- Ledger Chart of accounts, journals, cost centres and the financial statements built on them.
Every branch, one set of records
Sold at the counter, counted once
The till sells from the same stock and posts to the same accounts as everything else, with the branch carried as a dimension on the price, the offer and the ledger. A promotion runs the same way in every shop because it was described once.
What breaks first when a shop becomes a chain
It is never the selling. The till keeps working. What stops working is everything that has to be true across branches at once: the promotion that ran one way in the flagship and another way in the mall, the transfer that left one stockroom and was never received at the other, the return the customer wants to make somewhere other than where they bought, and the drawer that came up short on a Thursday with nobody able to say against what. The usual answer is a POS product plus an accounting product plus a nightly file between them, and the gap between the two is exactly where the missing two points of margin sit. Nama’s point of sale is not a separate product with a connector. It sells from the same stock and posts to the same accounts as the rest of the company, and a branch is a dimension on both.
The promotion, and what the counter is allowed to do
Offers in Nama are built to be described rather than programmed. An offer can target a brand, a category at any of five levels, an item class or a single item; it can require a minimum quantity, a minimum line value or a minimum invoice total; it can run between two dates and between two times of day, which is how a happy hour or a weekend promotion stops needing someone to remember to switch it off. Buy-X-get-Y is a free-item line, and the free item can be a group the customer chooses from rather than one fixed product. Where a free item is not wanted, the same rule can be set to give a percentage off the item’s price instead.
That is the design side. The counter side is what decides whether the promotion survives contact with a queue: the till can hold the entitlement until the customer actually fetches the free item, reconcile at payment for the cashier who forgot, split a line when more is scanned than is due, and refuse a scan that matches no pending entitlement at all. And because manual discounts can be blocked outright, what the customer is charged is what the promotion says, not what the cashier decided.
The shift, the drawer and the difference
Cash is the part of retail an ERP usually hands back to the shop. Nama gives it a document. A cashier opens a shift against a safe, carrying forward the closing balances of the shift before it; during the shift, receipts and payments are recorded as simplified vouchers with a single amount and no account to choose; at close, the counted cash is set against the system’s own figure, the difference is posted as an overage or a shortage rather than absorbed, and the remainder transfers to the main safe. A second shift cannot be opened while one is still open. In Saudi Arabia the invoice the till prints is a simplified tax invoice under the ZATCA rules, produced by the same engine that files the rest of the company’s invoices.
The stock behind the counter, and the customer in front of it
A chain’s stock question is not how much there is but where. Inventory holds every branch and stockroom as its own balance with transfers between them, prices and offers can be scoped per branch, and colour, size and lot travel on the line so a stocktake, a price list and an offer all speak about the same shirt. Selling online is the same stock again rather than a second one: the e-commerce connectors keep Salla, Zid, Magento and Amazon in step with real quantities and real prices. And the customer who comes back is a record, not a face — reward points earned on the invoice, a balance they can spend, a redemption confirmed by a code sent to their phone, and a return that takes the points back with the money.
Every screen, field and setting is documented in full.
Read the documentation →Good question — already answered
We run 'buy a large bottle of oil, get a small one free'. Will the till add the free bottle to the invoice before the customer has picked it up?
Only if you want it to. The default is to add the free item the moment the qualifying item is scanned, which suits some businesses and is wrong for a supermarket — a line would appear for something still sitting on the shelf. Switch the setting and the till instead keeps an entitlement against the invoice: the customer fetches the bottle, the cashier scans it like anything else, and the line becomes free. Scan three when one is due and the line splits into one free and two paid. Forget entirely, and at payment the till reconciles the invoice against the pending entitlements, converts anything already in the basket, and shows the cashier what is still owed with a scan field to claim it.
Can we stop cashiers giving discounts of their own?
Yes. One setting blocks manual discounts outright so that the only discounts allowed are the ones coming from defined offers, and it is enforced in the till's own pricing path rather than only on the back-office document. Where offers overlap, a priority decides which wins, and a top-priority promotion can be flagged to cancel every weaker discount across all offer types at once so promotions do not silently stack.
We sell the same shirt in four colours and five sizes. Does an offer that counts quantities treat them as one item or twenty?
Whichever you say. Colour, size, revision, lot, box and sub-item are each a switch on the offer aggregation key: turn one on and different values are counted separately, leave it off and they are summed together. So 'buy any three shirts' and 'buy three of the same size' are both expressible, and the difference is a setting rather than a workaround.
How does the drawer get reconciled at the end of a shift?
The cashier opens a shift against a named safe, and its opening balances are carried over from the previous shift's close rather than re-entered. During the shift receipts and payments are recorded as simplified single-amount vouchers that take their accounts from the shift, so the cashier never picks an account. At close, the system compares the counted cash against the shift's own total, posts the overage or shortage as a difference, and transfers the rest to the main safe. One user cannot open a second shift while one is still open.
Do we need a separate loyalty system?
Not to run points. Reward points are configured in Nama: earning rules per configuration, a live balance on the customer, redemption confirmed by a one-time code, and a message to the customer after each invoice showing what was earned and what the balance is now — in Arabic or English. Where you already belong to an external programme, there are integrations for STC Qitaf and for Datanuum, and returns reverse the points as well as the money.
Nama customers in Retail & Chain Stores
Our biggest problem before was that none of the data could be linked together — accounts, sales invoicing, the warehouse, inventory and HR could not be tied together at the press of a single button. Retrieving data in Namasoft is also dramatically faster; the sheer volume of data does not affect how easily you can extract it or work with the system.
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