Reporting

Reporting on POS Transaction data is obviously standard practice. Almost certainly your POS system already provides a way to do that.

Rattail considers its job here to be, “make more things more easily possible” - which is only needed if your existing reports are lacking in some way. Some specific goals here include:

If your POS Transaction data is already held in a SQL database, which you can query, then the “hardest” part of a report really should just be crafting the SQL query. For the common use case of generating an Excel file with report data, Rattail can provide basically everything but the SQL statement.

Reports available to Rattail may be generated via the web app. A report may accept/require certain parameters, which the user provides when generating.

When a report is generated the output file is “saved” for later viewing in the web app, along with details of who generated it etc.

It’s possible to automate report generation, although at this time it can’t be done via web app.

So that’s why you might want to use Rattail for reporting on POS Transaction data generally. But it’s often the case that the “raw” (native) schema for POS Transaction data is a bit complex, and this can make crafting the SQL queries difficult.

Additionally, the POS Transaction data may not even be in a SQL DB to begin with; some store it in a file, e.g. XML.

And not to mention, this data may not even have everything you need for your report. You may need to query additional systems etc. to supplement the transaction data in order to “complete” the report.

So first of all that is of course possible. Any report can read data from any “normal” place - SQL DB, file, web API, etc. and combine such data as needed.

But in the case of POS Transactions specifically, the process of reading data from disparate sources and combining, can be “expensive” in terms of compute power/time. Also you may need to do essentially the same thing for multiple reports.

And this is where Trainwreck comes in - the idea being that you import the POS Transactions data from the source, into the Trainwreck DB. It’s a little like running a one-time report to “translate” the transaction data into a simpler format, with all supplemental data merged in as needed.

Once the data is in Trainwreck you can write reports against that to your heart’s content. They will get to query a simpler schema and all that extra data is right there with it.