No fumbling around with a pen, paper forms, calculator, or even an online cashier app. Everything is done and digitally completed for you and your client on your iPad. The iTunes App Store has two useful free point of sale apps that provide you with a quick way to set your inventory and client information.

Quick Sale Lite

Don’t let the Lite version of Quick Sale make you think this app is not worth downloading. Quick Sale Lite has sufficient features for users who don’t need an elaborate payments system or who perhaps only have a small inventory of items and services for sale. Out of the two apps I will review here, Quick Sale is the most well designed and seriously easiest system to set up.

The Demo Company included in the app provides you with pretty much all you need to know to get started and set up your own business. The user interface was designed with you and your clients, not accountants, in mind. The register buttons are large for quick and easy data input.

Even if your client doesn’t have experience with an iPad, they can easily type in their personal information which becomes a part of your database.

You can create and organize all of your items, services and other costs, into categories and favorites for easy tapping and adding to a client invoice. Quick Sale also retains all of your invoices – paid and unpaid – and it breaks them down into the days and weeks they were added.

Of course if you need more, Quick Sale Pro includes features for exporting invoices as PDFs, quote estimates, and credit card processing. But for your basic needs, you can simply email invoices to your clients, similar to how Apple does receipts in its stores.

Ring It Up

Ring It Up lacks the design, intuitive use, and demonstration found in Quick Sale, but it still has features that might fit your particular needs.

The Main Menu of Ring It Up is where you can access all of its features for setting up your inventory of products and services, itemizing expenses, adding sales contacts, reviewing saved reports and more.

The free version of Ring It Up of course has limitations, but it’s useful if you only have lightweight sales needs or if you just want to try it before you purchase one of the more advanced versions.

The app also allows you to set up your inventory of products and services to be added at point of sale. You can also add clients directly in the app, or import their information from your Address Book. The app also includes a feature for scheduling recurring invoices or sales.

Thankfully the developers provide a way to customize the homepage of the device, with perhaps your company logo or an image of your work. Which is good because the cash register graphic is a serious turn off, to say the least.

Let us know what you think of these free point of sale solutions. There are other paid apps in the App Store that allow you to set up cash register apps for credit card payments and backend inventory, but these apps will at least let you see what the possibilities are for your own business.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

The creator of this printer inventory tool created it for his environment where they needed quick tallies of what was going on the network with printers ““ and it had to be easy enough for a sales person to use ““ gasp!

Go ahead and check out the download here. It was created for an ongoing contest from Donation Coder. The download is Windows only and weighs in at a meager 278KB. What more can we ask for?

Download and run the portable printer inventory tool and you will see a blank chart of a screen that looks like the screenshot below. You will see entries for IP Address, Mac Address, Host Name, Model Name, Serial Number, Total Page Count, Color Page Count and color toner levels. And not only that ““ this thing runs VERY VERY fast. Faster than any other network scanner I have used before.

Let us see how we can use this application in our own environment. Once you have the application launched, simply click on Printer Scanning on the top menu. This will give you a drop down where you can hit Start New Scan. Alternatively you can hit the F7 hot key.

Now you get to tell it what you want to scan. I tried once with my local subnet and then with a broader range and a different subnet mask. Both scans ran super fast and returned pretty much what I was looking for. If you do not change the community name in your environment leave it at public, but if you do modify it please add your community name here.

It is normal to see errors as it is scanning, if the commands are not understood by the specific printer it is talking to, or your community name has been modified. You will still see results as the scan is running and then you can get a better look at the results when you close the Network Scanning Status window.

Blamo ““ when my scan was done I saw lots of informational goodness!

Now you can double-click on an entry to get a closer look at it ““ or even modify its settings! Check it out:

You can change any of the fields and have it save the settings back! Wow pretty impressive. And what is even more impressive is the fact that the application outputs this data to the ever so popular CSV format by clicking on Reporting from the top menu and then Save As“¦

You can also email the report directly to the person who requested it from here. All in all a very handy and useful portable application for printer inventory or just simple administration.

Do you have another free lightweight printer inventory tool? Let us know in the comments!

Let us take a look at Household Register 2010 which is a 6.8MB download. Once it is installed you can launch it from your start menu.

You will see a screen that looks like this:

You will see the standard home inventory list fields in there such as item number, item name, category, quantity, location, purchase price and owner. Are you ready to add your items? Do you have a list of serial numbers?  Maybe you will need to go around and collect the information. But you will need to provide this data to this application as it is not magic. Keep your paper copy as well for a backup. And maybe save a copy of your file to your Dropbox or Gmail account.

You are now ready to begin. Hit the add button and  you will get a type of wizard to fill in your information, as you can see below. There are places to fill in all your data and several tabs to do it on. The interface is very intuitive and simple to use.

If you hit the down arrows after certain fields you will see a List that you can choose from like this one for the item below:

Next up is the value field asking you about how much it cost, what credit card it was purchased with and appraisal value etc.

The model tab is where you fill in manufacturer, serial number and who you bought it from. Simple and easy so far right?

The warranty tab shows you normal and extended warranty information such as the date, phone number for repair and cost. The more you fill in the better off you will be when the item is broken or stolen.

There are two more tabs, one for notes and the other to insert an image of the item. Then hit OK. That will bring you back to the main inventory screen as you can see below. Hit add to continue adding items until you are complete.

You can run reports against your items in the home inventory list and save them as PDF’s, HTML pages or just print them. Some of the included canned reports are warranty information, details, valuation, location, category and a bunch more.

I love some reporting!

This program helped me save my data so the next time I need something ““ I already have it. You will thank your lucky stars that you have this when you need it. Take the hour or so to do this!

What do you use to keep your home inventory list? Do you keep serial numbers? Do you not? Do you wish you had after an incident?  Share your experiences in the comments kiddies!

Download: House Hold Register

Spiceworks offers free network monitoring software for situations just like these, and even bigger networks. (Must run on Windows only – will detect *nix on network though.)

After scaling back our IT budget at work, we insourced the network management side of things. That’s when I came across Spiceworks. It does all the things I need it to do:

• Software, network, and PC inventory
• Network, Exchange, and license monitoring
• Asset and inventory reporting
• Helpdesk & IT Portal

Installation was as easy as anything I’ve ever installed. Then it automatically did its own network discovery, where it inventoried devices connected to the network, as well as what software and updates were on them.

Within 30 minutes, I had a high-level overview of everything in our office. That’s pretty amazing to me for free software. There were some computers it wouldn’t connect to due to local firewalls, but that was easy to remedy. And it let me know that those firewalls were there, which shouldn’t have been.

To help you along, Spiceworks has something they call the SpiceMeter. It’s a way of gauging what basic network maintenance activities you have done,as a sort of training program. This includes things like:

• accurately identifying 75% of your assets
• setting up a helpdesk
• troubleshooting problems through the remote control

When your SpiceMeter is at 100% you can consider yourself a Red Hot Spiceworks Pro.

The software itself is far too in-depth to cover here. Yet Spiceworks offers way more than the software. They have a strong and growing community of users that are people just like you – some are professionals with extensive experience and some have just been thrown in the deep end of the server room to sink or swim. I’m somewhere in the middle.

There is also plenty of free training available for Spiceworks through SpiceworksTV – a series of training videos and webinars to help you along in your quest for network mastery. There’s even a section on IT comedy, just in case you’re starting to lose your mind…again.

I find it amazing that this software is free – only supported by ads served to you in the administration screens. The ads take up less than an eighth of the screen and are usually very targeted to IT, so they can really be useful too. If you don’t care for the ads, sign up for the paid version at $20 a month. Same functionality, but no ads.

Honestly, I’m trying to find a real negative about this software, but I can’t. One could complain that it doesn’t run on anything but Windows, but there’s lots of software like that. Maybe it would run with WINE, I don’t know.You could also complain that it’s best for networks with 500 or less computers, but really, that’s a good size network for most businesses. If you aren’t sold yet, check out their awesome YouTube video.

Is it a coincidence that the marketing chick has the same first name as my ex-wife? I think not!

Are you the defacto IT person? What do you use to take care of your network? Have you had any experience with Spiceworks? Let us know!