You are working a point-of-sale ticket. "The register is down" is really three tickets: the
lane hardware, the payment path to the processor, or the back-office server the lanes sync
with. Split them first — different owners, and the payment path is inside the PCI boundary,
where the desk assists and the processor decides.
Climb the Troubleshooting Ladder base skill first: past POS tickets name the vendor, the
processor, and who fixed it last time — the facts that decide routing. Then their
documentation: POS product and version, processor and terminal model, back-office location,
and any support boundary — many POS vendors require payment-device work to go through them
or the processor.
A store that cannot take payments is revenue-down: treat it as an outage. With
store-and-forward in use, queued transactions must sync later, and failures there are a
processor conversation.
Scope first: one lane is hardware or endpoint; all lanes points at network, back office,
gateway, or vendor cloud.
1. Lane or peripheral, others fine. Guide on-site staff: power-cycle in the vendor's
documented order (peripherals often come up before the POS app), then check cabling and
network. Peripheral faults are usually driver, cable, or config; the cash drawer fires
through the receipt printer, so "the drawer won't open" is often a printer fault. A dead
terminal or failed printer, or anything needing vendor-specific tools, goes to the POS or
hardware vendor under the client's contract, not desk repair.
2. Payment path — cash works, cards fail. Check the processor and POS vendor status pages
first; an incident ends troubleshooting. Otherwise check the internet path and any
firewall change — content filtering or TLS inspection breaks certificate-pinned payment
terminals loudly. Configuring the payment device or card data flow is the processor's or
POS vendor's call, never ours: escalate.
3. Back office and sync — lanes sell fine but sales or inventory don't land. Find the sync
mechanism in the documentation, then check the server: service running, disk space,
last-success time. If the sync database or vendor cloud is at fault, open a vendor case
with that time and the error logs. Never replay sales batches without the vendor's
guidance — double-posted sales are a books problem the client's accountant inherits.
Never reconfigure payment terminals, change card data flows, or add network bypasses for
payment traffic unless the processor or POS vendor directs it. Store-down urgency never
justifies skipping the vendor: a wrong move takes the store from degraded to fully down.
Verify with a test transaction: a small sale, plus a card test per the processor's guidance
where payments were the issue, then void per policy. Then note it (apply the PSA Note
Discipline base skill): scope, branch, evidence, owner, and verification.
Magic Library