The CounterPoint Products offer a detailed Transaction Log for detailed problem solving, checking for malfeasance, or that no other problems exist as undetected.  Using this tool periodically may be a good Systems Administrative procedure to consider.  If you turn this feature on, you need to monitor the size of the disk files created.

From the CounterPoint Version 7 Documentation the Transaction Log is described as:

"The Ticket Entry Transaction Log allows you to record and monitor the activities of Point of Sale registers. This feature allows you to log specific “cashier events” to a text file for later review. Reviewing this log can help you identify potential problems or patterns of abuse that would not be visible in Ticket History, such as excessive no-sales or tickets that were initiated but not completed.

The log itself contains critical information such as date/time, a description of the activity/event, user ID, register #, ticket #, and pertinent dollar amounts. Entries are recorded in the log in the order in which they occur."

There are quite a few options of what events to record.  For example you have the option of weather or not to record on a store wide basis or a register basis.  Or weather to record when the drawer is opened/closed by a regular ticket entry transaction, the open/close menu option or through automatic EOD posting.

Some other options that the Transaction Log can record are:

• Ticket start/complete

• Ticket void

• Ticket Reprint

• Line edit/delete

• End Of Day start/end

• Security Overrides.

Each one of these can be turned on or off independently so you can pick and choose which ones are the most important to you.

Please keep in mind that if you select to retain logs for each store, multiple registers may try to update the log file simultaneously.  This can result in a file conflict that can cause a failure in updating the log. File conflicts become more likely with increasing numbers of active registers. You can avoid this problem by retaining a separate log for each register.

You must also keep in mind that, although these files are fairly small to begin with, that over time they will increase in size.  They should be moved out of the CounterPoint directory and saved elsewhere.  The file will automatically re-generate the next time it is written to.

The log file generated is kept in your company directory (i.e. C:\synshare\syn\demo1). It is named according to whether you are logging by store or register.
 

• If logging by register, the file will be named "TLOGRXXX.LOG" (where XXX represents the register number)

• If logging by store, the file will be named "TLOGSXXX.LOG" (where XXX represents the store number).

• The file generated is a text file that can be read with the Notepad or Word Pad applications that come with the Windows Operating System.  In a Unix/Linux environment the file can be read using the "more" command, the "less" command, the "cat" command, or it can be transferred to a Windows PC for viewing.

Here is a brief example of what the transaction log may look like depending on what features you have turned on.
 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Date      Time    User-ID     Str  Reg  Drw  Tick-#  Line-#  Description Item-#             Orig-value       Curr-value Customer-#
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
04/20/09  10:12:20  Z             1    1    1     502          Begin ticket                                               WALK-IN
04/20/09  10:12:34  Z             1    1    1     502          Complete ticket                                     123.87 WALK-IN
04/20/09  10:15:51  Z             1    1    1                  No sale
04/20/09  10:15:54  Z             1    1    1     503          Begin ticket                                               WALK-IN
04/20/09  10:16:15  Z             1    1    1     503          Complete ticket                                      65.74-WALK-IN

CPSQL also offers this option on a Workstation/Register basis. With the amount of detail produced by CPSQL, you will probably require the help of the CCS Support Department to use this for problem solving.

If you have any questions about how to set this up on your system, feel free to email me or call me at 800-672-4806

Hope You Had A Great Weekend
-Bryan