The company is small. Accounting in retail outlets was carried out exclusively in sum, exactly in the spirit of the end of the last century. However, it suited everyone.
But there is nothing to do. Law is law.
I began to survey the online checkout market. At that time (October 2017) it was a heartbreaking sight. There were two options:
- Buy a full-fledged computer at every point, a Windows license for it, a 1C license for it, connect it to the Internet or buy 3G / 4G modems, set up an overwhelming 1C Retail with its own freaks. Well, again. Considering the format of the stores (small pavilions), there was simply no place in them where all this stuff could be put, including the keyboard and mouse.
- Buy a promising platform EVOTOR (EVOLUTION OF TRADING). Which promised a lot and immediately. The most important thing is everything in one bottle. What is it. Tablet based on Android. It is included in the kit and in the same case as a KKT with PV. All this is smeared with its shell. The shell is quite friendly to itself, but like any start-up it suffers from a bunch of childhood diseases.
Based on the results of the meeting and an estimate of the necessary financial resources, it was decided to purchase one EVOTOR in order to research and implement a pilot project in one of the retail outlets.
The purchased first EVOTOR fully met expectations. You could connect to it remotely through your personal account. Help the seller with advice or action. Let me remind you that the project was very crude and glitches were pouring in like a cornucopia.
Nicely pleased with the API. Which made it possible to read sales at the outlet on the fly and load them into the main system. System of inventories, returns to the supplier, etc.
Based on the results of testing and implementation at one retail outlet, a decision was made to purchase for all other EVOTOR points. What? Cheap and cheerful.
The spring of 2018 was spent on the purchase, configuration and implementation of these devices.
Inspired by the first successes, I joined the slender ranks of the EVOTOR developers. I wrote processing for 1C 7.7, which I used only for my company, loading data into EVOTOR with prices and unloading sales data from the EVOTOR cloud. I wrote bug reports regularly. Communicated with the developers. For hours I sat over the apparatus playing the so-called. "Intermittent" errors. In general, the enthusiasm of the lane!
Well, then “appetite comes with eating”. Having data on sales, the company's management decided to move from the outdated system of total accounting to quantitative and total and further to quantitative as the system improved.
A small digression follows. At that time, this work was not my main job. An ordinary part-time job. I worked at a local thermal power plant as a programmer, then in a company selling equipment and programs to restaurants. But then he received an offer from the management of the company described here, which he could not refuse, and switched to full-fledged activity in it.
And then everything started spinning a second time.
The decision of the management to switch to quantitative and total accounting in retail outlets required a radical revision of the software. Let me remind you that the company worked on the program of 1998 release.
Having come to the company on a full schedule on October 1, 2019, he decided to switch to 1C 8.3 of his own design from scratch. This is a separate story (maybe I'll write it if anyone is interested), but by February 1, 2020 the program was written and launched.
There was a bright future ahead. A new system works on the basis with all the functionality that the 8.3 platform allows. Evotors work at the points. Sales data is loaded, price data is unloaded. It remains to establish an inventory system, write-offs, returns to suppliers and ... it's in the bag. You can rest on your laurels and look for new horizons ...
But it was not there.
Meanwhile, in a distant, distant galaxy (crossed out) in the head office of the EVOTOR leadership, a plan has matured. Either someone didn’t have enough for a new yacht, or a new island in the Bahamas, or the management of EVOTOR realized that the first wave of the OFD excitement had passed and there were not enough new sales ... It doesn’t matter. They started to tighten the nuts.
First, the free remote access to EVOTOR through the personal account was cut. Now it was 1 hour per month. We were ready for this. Equipped with concrete-driving grandmothers as sellers who have gone through both the Crimea and the eye, able to sort out and start the refrigerator in the store with our hands, we looked with a smile at the lack of remote access.
Then free remote access was cut off forever. We laughed again.
Then there was no laughing matter. We were disabled access to the EVOTOR cloud with the motivation “unauthorized access to cloud data”. I remind you. I was a member of the development team, I developed a data exchange system from the cloud with my own program and then with all the stops.
They demanded 300 rubles per month for each point (31 points). Poorly poorly managed to agree on 150. Access was restored.
Further more. They stopped responding to bug reports from the word AT ALL. Has EVOTOR lost sales data for the previous day? Do YOU ​​have a premium subscription? Oh no? Contact the data exchange developer. That is, they suggested that I contact me with this question. Although the API was honest, there is no sales data.
Then the idea of ​​quantitative and total accounting in retail outlets failed. For one banal reason. EVOTOR is not able to issue the total inventory result. For the reason that it incorrectly calculates sales during the day and its data on the availability of goods in the outlet does not correspond to reality.
The product cannot be returned to the supplier because it is not on the balance according to the data of EVOTOR. See above for data quality.
Return to the supplier can be issued only if the goods were received at the EVOTOR itself. The developers of EVOTOR never thought about the client's own accounting system.
When writing off an item, the price of the item being written off must be entered manually each time for the same reason.
Connecting the scales to the EVOTOR suffered the same fate. Having paid 5000 rubles for the weighing driver (the driver needs to be bought for each scale at the point), we saw that EVOTOR does not allow to manually enter the weight of the WEIGHTED goods contrary to the federal law, which says - if the manufacturer's weight is indicated on the packaging of the weight goods, then it should be indicated in the check regardless of the indications of the scales. The weight on the scales or on the packaging should be in the buyer's favor.
An attempt to connect the online banking terminals of the glorious Sberbank to EVOTOR deserves a separate story. We suffered for 6 months. From the points they report - the terminals do not work. They turn off arbitrarily, the EVOTOR itself is arbitrarily rebooted. All attempts to find the culprit have failed completely. Sberbank nodded at EVOTOR. EVOTOR nodded at Sberbank. Who made the suit? It is decidedly not clear. I had to switch to offline banking terminals. How many "kind" words I heard then from the salespeople and management. But there was nothing to do.
The "Equipment check" deserves a separate story. ABOUT! How much blood and sweat it cost. At an arbitrary moment in time, EVOTOR flashed "Checking equipment" and that's it ... All attempts to revive him ended in nothing. A whole instruction was developed. I will quote it verbatim “When an error occurs - Checking the equipment - turn off the terminal, disconnect it from the 220 volt network. Close the store. Wait 5-15 minutes. Enable. If an error appears again, do it all over again. " For technical support requests, the answer was invariably "Do you have a premium subscription?" "No?" - It's your problems.
Well, the cherry on the cake was the fact that those "children's problems" described at the beginning of the article became chronic and no one dealt with them. There are so many of them that there is neither strength nor desire to describe each one.
In June 2020, exhausted by daily calls to every point with all of the above problems, I offered the leadership a radical way out.
And then everything was simple. We chose a different platform. I will not mention it here to avoid being accused of advertising. I wrote my system for it and tomorrow, 10/23/2020, the moment will come when the LAST EVOTOR in our company will go to the landfill. With what pleasure I will smash him with a sledgehammer in the backyard of our warehouse ...
Best regards.