That's indeed a very good point Richard. In fact I followed it up with
a visit to my local petrol station to check it out and find out a bit
more about how they do it.
As it turn out, the system consists of a back office server, pump
interfaces and a Main console in the shop (point of sale). For what I
saw and was explained to me by the owner, once a purchase has been
registered, the Main console sends information to the EFTPOS device
where the customer swipes the card and the card details are captured and
sent to the Main Console. The EFTPOS is always connected to the Main
console, not stand alone.
In this case, Caltex owns the lot, the EFTPOS device, the server and the
Main console. It appears that they have a clearing house that does the
smarts in Caltex head office. These transactions appear to go to and
from head office (my guess) and they get into the banking system
somewhere there.
The interesting thing appears to be the use of a clearing house owned by
the petrol company, who I'm sure have a bit of business leverage with
the banks. I'm not sure if the banks deal with the petrol station
directly (as they would do with a medical practice).
Maybe the solution is to sub-let floor space for the practice in a
petrol station corner, (:-).
mario
Richard Hosking wrote:
Your average retailer/service station seems to have their systems linked
to the EFTPOS machine. Presumably it is not that hard for medical
software to be interfaced.
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