Selling by the Kilo: A POS for Butchers, Grocers & Deli Counters in Lebanon

Half the shops in Lebanon sell things that don't come in units. Meat, cheese, olives, nuts, produce, baklava — you don't sell one of them, you sell 1.352 kilos of them. And yet most point-of-sale software can only count whole pieces, which quietly forces you into a workaround that costs you money every single day.

The workaround everyone uses — and what it costs

If your POS can't do decimals, you improvise. The three classic hacks:

The "misc item". A generic product where the cashier types the total price by hand. Fast, but the sale is now anonymous — you have no idea whether you sold cheese or chicken.
Fake units. Creating a product called "Feta 250g" so it can be counted. Now your cashier does arithmetic in their head at the counter, and any customer who wants 400 grams breaks the system.
The calculator and the notebook. Weigh, multiply, write it down, add it up at the end of the day.

Each of these works, in the sense that money ends up in the drawer. But all three destroy the same thing: the truth about your inventory. If the system doesn't know how many grams of feta left the building, it can never tell you how many grams should still be there.

The thing you can't see: shrinkage

A butcher buys 100 kg of beef. Between trimming, fat, spoilage, staff meals, a heavy hand on the scale, and the occasional theft, maybe 92 kg gets sold. Those 8 kg are shrinkage — stock you paid for and never got paid for.

Shrinkage is normal. Not knowing the number is not. If every sale is recorded to the gram, you can do the one calculation that matters: what the system says I should have versus what's actually in the fridge. The gap is real money, and once you can see it week to week, you can do something about it — retrain a heavy-handed cashier, reorder more accurately, or price the loss in properly instead of discovering it at year end.

A POS that counts pieces cannot give you that number. A POS that counts grams can.

How it should work

In YellowPOS you set a product's unit to kg. That one change reframes everything about it:

Its price becomes the price per kilo — $12.00 means $12.00/kg, not $12.00 a piece.
Its quantity can be a decimal — 1.352 is a perfectly valid amount to sell.
Its stock is a weight — 10 means 10 kg of cheese in the fridge.

At the register, the cashier taps the product and types the weight, and the line prices itself: 1.352 kg × $12.00 = $16.22. Stock drops from 10 kg to 8.648 kg. The receipt prints the weight, so the customer can see exactly what they paid for — which quietly kills a whole category of argument at the counter.

If you have a barcode-printing scale, skip the typing

If you already own a label-printing scale — the kind that weighs an item and spits out a sticker — you don't even need to type the weight. That sticker's barcode has the product code and the weight baked into its digits. Your cashier scans it like any other barcode and the correctly-weighted line just appears.

You don't need a cable between the scale and the till, and you don't need to buy a specific brand: you tell YellowPOS once how your scale writes its barcodes, and it reads them from then on. There's a full breakdown in how to connect a barcode-printing scale to your POS.

No scale? Everything above still works — you just type the weight instead of scanning it.

What changes in the shop

No mental arithmetic at the counter. Fewer mistakes, faster queue, less money left on the table by cashiers rounding down to be nice.
Real product-level reporting. "Misc item" tells you nothing. Now you can actually see that halloumi outsells feta 3:1 and buy accordingly.
Honest margins. Your cost per kilo against your revenue per kilo, per product — not a guess.
A receipt customers trust. The weight and the per-kilo price are printed, not just a total.
Returns that don't corrupt stock. Void a sale and the exact weight goes back — 8.648 kg returns to a clean 10 kg, not "about 9".

Frequently asked questions

Can a POS handle products sold by the kilo?

Yes, if it supports decimal quantities. In YellowPOS you set a product's unit to kg, which makes its price a price-per-kilo and lets its quantity be a decimal like 1.352. Stock is then tracked as a weight rather than a count of pieces.

How do butchers and grocers track stock by weight?

You enter stock as a weight — 10 means 10 kg, not 10 pieces. Every sale subtracts the exact weight sold, so selling 1.352 kg from 10 kg leaves 8.648 kg. That gives you a real figure to compare against what is physically left in the fridge.

Do I need a scale connected to the computer?

No cable is needed. If you have a barcode-printing scale, it prints a label with the weight inside the barcode and your cashier just scans it. If you have no scale at all, you can type the weight at the POS instead — both work.

What is shrinkage and why does selling by weight matter for it?

Shrinkage is stock you paid for but never sold — trimmings, spoilage, over-generous portions, and theft. If your POS only counts pieces, you cannot see it. Once every sale is recorded to the gram, you can compare what the system says you should have against what is actually on the shelf, and the gap is your shrinkage.

Which businesses need selling by weight?

Butchers, cheese and deli counters, fruit and vegetable shops, mini-markets, nut and coffee roasters, spice shops, sweet shops selling baklava by the kilo, and anyone selling loose goods rather than pre-packaged units.

Start with one product

You don't have to convert your whole catalog. Pick the one product you sell most of by weight, set its unit to kg, and run it for a week. Then compare what the system says you have left against what's in the fridge — that single number usually pays for the subscription several times over. The setup takes a few minutes and is walked through in the Weighing Scale guide. Every plan includes a 1-month free trial.