Opening a new shop in Saudi Arabia: the POS side, in order

Opening a shop has a natural order, and getting it wrong means waiting. Here is the point-of-sale portion, sequenced so nothing blocks anything else.

Before the POS: the two documents everything depends on

1. Commercial registration. Your legal name on every invoice comes from here.
2. VAT registration, if you are required to register or choose to. Your 15-digit VAT number is on every tax invoice and in every ZATCA exchange.

You cannot onboard a device with ZATCA without these. Start them early; everything else waits on them.

Eight weeks out: choose the system

Use the method inhow to choose a POS. For a new shop specifically, weight two things heavily:

• Self-service setup. You will be changing things daily for the first month. A system where a price change is a support ticket will drive you to distraction.
• Room to grow. The second branch is a real possibility and migrating at that point is expensive.

Six weeks out: build the catalogue

The single biggest determinant of a smooth opening.

• Products with barcodes, cost prices, sell prices
• VAT treatment per product, confirmed with your accountant
• Categories that match how customers ask for things, not how your supplier organises them
• Modifiers, if you sell prepared food
• Variants as one product with children

Get barcodes right now. Products without a manufacturer barcode need your own, printed as labels. Deciding this in week one is easy; deciding it on opening morning is not.

Four weeks out: hardware

Order it, do not wait for it. See thehardware guide. Minimum for a single counter:

• A terminal with an integrated mada reader
• A wired 80mm thermal printer
• A cash drawer, if you take cash
• A scanner, if you carry stock
• A spare tablet or laptop as the browser-cashier fallback
• A backup 4G/5G router

Three weeks out: onboard ZATCA and connect the rest

• Onboard every terminal with ZATCA. See theonboarding guide.
• Print a receipt and scan the QR. Do this now, not on opening day.
• Connect your payment provider and confirm settlement details point at your own account.
• Set up the accounting export to whatever your accountant uses.
• Register with delivery platforms if you sell food; each one takes its own time.

Two weeks out: people

• Create a user per staff member.Not one shared login — you will never be able to investigate anything.
• Set permissions: who can discount, refund, void, change prices, see reports. Default to less.
• Train in twenty-minute sessions on the real system with the real catalogue: a normal sale, a return, a shift close.
• Write the outage procedure and put it under the till. Seeoffline rules.

One week out: rehearse

Run a full day of fake trading. Ring up fifty sales, process five returns, close the shift, reconcile the drawer, and read the reports.

Everything that is going to go wrong on opening day will go wrong in this rehearsal, at no cost.

Opening day

• Enter opening stock as counted quantities, not estimates
• Have a manager on the floor the whole day — not in the office
• Print and scan one receipt in the first hour
• Check the ZATCA acceptance dashboard at the end of the day
• Reconcile the drawer and expect a variance; find out why

Week one

Check daily: cash variance, ZATCA rejections, top-selling products against what you stocked, and staff complaints.

Fix the top three friction points before week two. They compound.

The three mistakes new shops make

One shared login. It makes every future question unanswerable.

No cost prices. You will not know your margin until someone backfills a whole catalogue.

Skipping the rehearsal. The rehearsal costs a day. Opening day problems cost customers.

For what a complete system includes, see thefeatures page; for what it costs, thepricing page.