Stand at the front of a supermarket in Manchester, Chicago, Dubai and Kochi and you are looking at the same thing: a screen, a scanner, a drawer full of cash and a person who wants to go home. Ask what it is called and you get four answers, none of which the others recognise.
This is a short tour of those answers. It is mostly for fun, but there is a serious point at the end for anyone who writes software, signage or training material for shops in more than one country.
United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia — "the till"
Till is an old English word for a drawer or compartment, older than the machine itself. The cashier is "on the till", the receipt printer takes a "till roll", and counting the cash at closing time is "cashing up". British retail systems carried the word into software, and because a great deal of early point-of-sale documentation was written in the UK, "till" travelled further in manuals than it ever did in shops. Outside the Commonwealth it tends to land with a blank look.
United States and Canada — "the register"
In 1879 a saloon owner in Dayton, Ohio, patented a mechanical cash register to stop his bartenders pocketing the takings. It had a bell that rang when the drawer opened — which is why Americans still "ring up" a sale, long after the bell went quiet. The queue is the "checkout line", the machine is "the register", and "till" survives in American English only for the removable tray inside the drawer.
India — "the billing counter"
Walk into any store from Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram and the sign above the payment point says Billing. You "get the bill made", you "go to the billing counter" (or the "cash counter"), and the person there is the cashier or the billing staff. Nobody has a till; a "register" is the book you sign at the gate. Malayalam and Hindi have adopted billing wholesale — it is one of those English words that has become more Indian than English.
The Gulf — "the cashier", in both languages
In Arabic the person and the place blur together. الكاشير (the cashier) is where you pay; الصندوق — literally "the box" — is the drawer, the cash function, and by extension the treasury (a treasurer is أمين الصندوق, the keeper of the box). English signs in Saudi and Emirati shops read Cashier or Payment counter. "Register" is understood but sounds imported; "till" is simply unknown.
Everyone else: it's a box
French la caisse, Spanish la caja, Italian la cassa, German die Kasse, Turkish kasa, Dutch kassa — all of them mean "the box", and passer à la caisse is simply "to go and pay". Malay has kaunter, Filipino borrowed cashier, Japanese has reji (from register). The drawer is the oldest idea in the room; the touchscreen is a recent guest, and most languages never bothered to rename the furniture for it.
And what about "POS"?
"Point of sale" is the one phrase every market shares — among people who buy the systems. Among people who use them it fragments again. In India, "the POS" usually means the small card machine the bank gives you. In the Gulf, ادفع بالشبكة ("pay by the network") is the everyday phrase, and the POS is the device you tap. In the US and UK, POS is the software. The acronym is universal; its meaning is not — which is arguably worse than a regional word, because everyone assumes they agree.
Why the word on the button matters
A shop can call the thing whatever it likes; the customer sees a person and a card reader. Software has to name it — on the button, in the setting, in the error message at nine at night when the drawer will not close. If the button says "Close till" and the cashier has never heard the word, the confusion is the software's fault, not the cashier's.
Words also carry procedures. "Cash up" assumes a British closing routine. "Z report" belongs to a particular generation of electronic registers. "No-sale" is American register jargon for opening the drawer without a transaction. Each is precise, and each is local. A product used in Riyadh, Dubai and Kochi has to pick the plainest word in each place — and, where none is plain, describe the action instead of naming the furniture.
That is why BIZA's point of sale talks about the billing counter: you open the counter to start a shift, do a cash count when you close it, and complete a sale rather than ring one. "Cash drawer" stays, because it is the hardware and every printer manual on earth calls it that. And "POS" stays as the module's name, because it is the one term on every procurement checklist in every country.
The only rule worth keeping from all this: English is a locale too. The right English for a shop is the one spoken at its counter, not the one in the manual.
A promise to the till people
Which leaves one group unfairly treated by all of the above: the shopkeeper in Leeds or Melbourne who has been on the till for twenty years and does not want to open a "billing counter", thank you very much. That is fair. "Billing counter" is the plainest choice across the markets BIZA serves today, but plain in Kochi is not plain in Cork.
So here is where this is going. BIZA already speaks English, Arabic and Malayalam at the cash count — Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, Korean and Japanese are in beta with more on the way, and you can ask for access — and the next step is letting each region choose its own retail dialect within a language — so a shop in the UK can open a till, ring a sale and cash up, an American store can open the register and ring up the customer, and an Indian one keeps its billing counter, all on the same buttons, in the same product. The words on the screen should belong to the person standing at it.
Stay tuned. And if your shop has a word for the thing that takes the money that we have not listed here, we would genuinely like to hear it.
See what the billing counter actually does on the POS feature page, or read the POS guides.