My mentor (’client’ in this case) wants to digitalize his education business, replacing paper formats of all his student course and transaction information. He hires an assistant to document all the records, generate reports and deliver receipts. Digital transformation allows him to understand the business at a glance, as well as saving labour costs.
In this blog, we are going to demonstrate how to build a one stop POS system through Google Sheets and Apps Script. We will explore this through three key techniques: Google query function, Scripts and spreadsheet formula. A basic understanding of excel and SQL would be good, but it is not essential.
Please note that all data are fictional in this page
Click here to access the actual spreadsheet
Input: a/ Course Information, b/ Student Information
Output: a/ Transaction, b/ Receipt
We need to develop a user interface for our client to import the course and student information, and input a price method to generate a record. Furthermore, the receipt is exported in PDF format before being sent to the customer. Above is the process that we work on…
After we layout the process flow, it is time to select which tools to develop the system. This decision is based on 3 factors: which are user capability, costs and maintenance, in that order. After considering these factors, we decide to go for Google Workspace which includes Google Sheets and Apps Script.
User Capability
My mentor is not a tech savvy person. By my observation, he is only comfortable to use spreadsheet; it may take him much effort and time to learn using a new software.
Costs
Developing a brand-new software takes significant time to code, which is not allowed under current circumstance. (work at daytime and master degree research at night time) In addition, it is costly to manage a database. Google Sheets and Apps Script are free to use.
Maintenance
A Cloud based solution minimizes the version control risk, while we can walk through the features with him on the same page. For other solutions, it may dig in the log report and see the bugs at the backend, which is not as convenient as Google Sheets and Apps Script.
