Integrating Electronic Scales with Market Control POS

as everybody knows Electronic Scales are used in stores for the coding and weighting of different items, usually in food related industries, customer can purchase items in Kilograms or portion of kilograms and the electronic scale uses a special code system to embed Item-code + Weight within the bar code.

Such feature facilitates the checkout of items on the Cashier who will scan the weighted food item using the bar code generated by the scale identifying both item-code and weight in one scan.

Softex Market Control POS : http://www.softexsw.com/market-control-online.php  supports reading of Electronic Scales bar codes via a dynamic reading mechanism, in order to setup this by yourself you need to understand first how the bar code is printed from the scale to read it from Softex POS System.

Basically the most common POS bar codes consist of 13 digits, they are classified as following :

PPCCCCCKKGGGF

so what is this ? the Explanation for these letters as following :

PP

This is the prefix of the code, this should be a fixed number for all Scale items to start with , some people uses 00 or 20 , you can use anything that your scale supports. this option is setup through the Scale itself and these 2 letters are called Prefix.

CCCCC

This is the internal system code of the item itself , if the item code in your Scale is 10 for example then you need to identify it as 00010 on the Market control items screen. the most important factor is that item codes must be 5 digits to maintain the correct bar code length.

KK

This is the number of Kilograms weighted by the Scale, if the customer purchase 4 Kilograms, the scale will print it as 04 to maintain the correct bar code length. As per the format, the maximum Weight for purchase is 99 Kilograms.

GGG

This is the number of Grams weighted by the scale , if the customer purchase 750 Grams, the scale will print it as 750 to maintain the correct bar code length. Such field can be used in combination with the above Kilogram fields [KK] to represent Kilos and portion of kilos weighted.

F

Finally the last digit , this character is here only to complete the original barcode length of 13 characters, so it is almost useless in most scenarios, whatever the value of this field, it should affect nothing with Softex MC POS readings.

Live Example :

A scale barcode of 2000020025001 represents the Item with code : 00020 and weight of 2 Kilograms and 250 Grams.

Enjoy :)