POS, stock and VAT software for butcheries in South Africa

A lamb or a side of beef comes in as one line on a supplier invoice, then leaves the shop as chops, mince, stewing beef, bones and trim at ten different prices per kilogram. Without a way to split that cost across the cuts, you are guessing at margin. Most butchery owners can tell you what they paid per kilogram and what they charge, but not what the trim, bone loss and giveaway actually cost them.

Saturday morning the queue is out the door, everything is priced per kilogram, half the customers want a braai pack special and someone is paying part cash, part card. Handwritten dockets and a calculator get the customer served, but nothing gets recorded properly. By Monday nobody can reconcile the till float, the card machine settlement and the day's takings.

Between staff meals, unrecorded mark-downs on ageing stock, over-generous weighing, freezer burn and outright theft, a butchery can lose several percent of turnover without a single obvious incident. When stock is only counted at month end — if at all — the loss is invisible until the profit is gone. You suspect a problem but you have no evidence and no idea which line or which shift it sits on.

Fresh meat is standard-rated, but a butchery counter usually also sells eggs, milk and vegetables that are zero-rated, so the day's takings are a mix. Add supplier invoices from abattoirs, spice and casing wholesalers, packaging suppliers and the electricity bill, and every two months becomes a scramble to piece together output and input VAT before the SARS eFiling deadline.

Receive the carcass or bulk box into Tallium AI at its real landed cost, then record what it broke down into — chops, mince, sausage, trim, bones. The app carries the cost through to each finished line, so your reports show the gross margin per cut and per kilogram instead of one blended guess. Do it for a few weeks and you will see exactly which cuts and which suppliers are carrying the shop.

Ring up items by the kilogram, part-kilogram or as a fixed-price braai pack, split a payment across cash and card, and print or email the slip. Every sale updates stock and the books at the same moment, so there is no evening capture session. The till runs in the browser or on the Tallium AI mobile app, so if the fibre drops or you are on the generator, staff can keep serving from a phone on mobile data.

Live stock levels mean you can count the fridge and freezer on any quiet afternoon and see the variance immediately, per line, rather than waiting for month end. Roles and permissions control who may discount, void a sale or adjust stock, and every one of those actions is logged against a named user. The AI insights flag unusual patterns — a line whose waste suddenly jumps, or a shift with far more voids than the others.

Set each product as standard-rated or zero-rated once and the app applies it at the till from then on, keeping your output VAT split correctly across a mixed basket. Photograph supplier invoices with your phone and the AI reads and files them as input VAT. When the period closes, your VAT report gives you the figures to capture on SARS eFiling — please confirm your rate treatment and current rules with SARS or a qualified local tax professional before you file.