How to set up a POS in under 10 minutes — no hardware required

If you have been putting off digitising your shop because “setting up a POS” sounds like a weekend project, here is the news: it is not. With Kaspa you can go from “still using a calculator” to “ringing up your first digital sale” in under ten minutes, on the phone you already own, with no hardware.

This is the playbook. We will walk through it step by step. No skipped steps, no assumed prior knowledge.

Before you start: what you actually need

You need:

• A phone, tablet, or laptop with Chrome. Any Android from the last six years works. iPhone works. iPad works. A laptop is fine. The browser is the only requirement.
• Your phone number. You will sign in with an SMS code.
• Three minutes of your day. That is the minimum honest estimate.

You do not need:

• A thermal printer (you can buy one later — sales work without it).
• A barcode scanner (the assistant can search by name and most shops never use a scanner).
• An iPad / tablet / register hardware.
• A laptop.
• An email address.
• A credit card.
• An IT person.
• A “POS license”.
• A merchant account (you can pick that up later).

If you have those things you already paid for, great — Kaspa works with them. If you do not, the phone in your pocket is enough to start.

The 10-minute setup

Minute 1: Open the link

On your phone, open Chrome. Go to pos.trykaspa.com. That is the whole address. No app to install, no app store.

Optional but recommended: tap the share menu and “Add to Home Screen”. This gives you an icon that opens Kaspa like a native app. Looks the same, behaves the same — but no download.

Minute 2: Sign in with your phone number

Tap “Sign in”. Type your phone number. The country code is set automatically. An SMS arrives with a 6-digit code. Type the code.

You are in. No email verification, no password to remember, no captcha that does not load on slow data.

If the SMS does not arrive in 30 seconds, the screen offers a “Resend” option. If you are on a number that does not receive international SMS reliably (some prepaid plans), use a WhatsApp option instead. This is the single slowest step in the whole setup, and it is almost always the SMS network’s fault, not ours.

Minute 3: Meet the AI assistant

The assistant greets you. It introduces itself in your language (autodetected from your device locale, or it will ask). It offers to set up your shop.

You say what you sell. “I run a cafe in Borella.” Or “kade ekak Galle.” Or “pharmacy in Kandy.” It does not need to be a precise category — the assistant figures out the shape of your shop from the conversation. See how the assistant works for the longer explanation.

Minutes 4–6: Add your first 5 products

This is the only step that scales with the size of your shop. You have three options.

Option A — speak or type one at a time. Say “Add black coffee for 350.” The assistant adds it. “Add a samosa for 100.” Done. “Add a hot chocolate for 450.” Done.

This is the fastest path for a small list under 30 products.

Option B — paste a list. Open the assistant. Paste your menu or product list as text — even from a WhatsApp message — and say “Add these to my products.” The assistant parses lines like “Coffee 350” or “Coffee - Rs. 350” or “Coffee, 350, milk-based” and adds them as products with the right prices.

This is the fastest path for a list of 30 to 200 products.

Option C — upload a CSV or Excel. If you already have your products in a spreadsheet from a previous POS or your distributor, drop the file into the assistant. Kaspa’s AI mapper reads any column order, any language for the headers, any format. Confirm the column mapping. Done.

This is the fastest path for a list over 200 products. Even a 3,000-line pharmacy product list takes about 2 minutes from upload to “all imported”.

For this 10-minute playbook, we are going to assume Option A — adding five products by voice or text. Just enough to ring up a real sale.

Minute 7: Set up your first cashier (optional, but quick)

If you are the only person ringing up sales, you can skip this step.

If a second person is on the counter, say to the assistant: “Add a cashier named [name], PIN [4 digits].” Done. That cashier signs in with their PIN, and from then on every sale they ring up is tagged to them. End-of-day, you see per-cashier totals.

Minute 8: Tax and currency check

Most shops do not need this — the assistant picks your currency from your phone region and assumes no VAT/tax unless you tell it otherwise.

If your shop charges tax, say “Set tax to 8%.” Or “Set VAT to 18%.” Done.

If your shop sells tax-included prices (i.e., the customer-facing price already includes tax), say “Tax is included in displayed prices.” The receipts will print accordingly.

Minute 9: The first test sale

Tap to open the sell screen. Tap one of your products. Tap again to add a second one. Tap “Pay”. Pick “Cash” (or “Card” if you took the customer’s card through your own card terminal). Tap “Done”. Sale complete.

That is it. You just rang up a sale on a POS, on the phone in your hand, with no setup wizard, no software install, no hardware purchase. The sale is logged, the stock decremented, the cashier (you) credited.

If you want to print a receipt, you can — but you need a thermal printer. We will come back to that.

Minute 10: Check the reports

Open the assistant. Say “What did I sell today?”

The assistant gives you a tidy summary: total sales, transaction count, top product, total cash. Same for “this week”, “this month”, “by cashier”, or “compare to last week” once you have history.

This is the entire reports interface. There is no separate dashboard to learn. You ask, you get.

That is the 10-minute setup. You have a working POS. You can stop here and run your shop tonight.

What you can add later, without restarting anything

Thermal printer (10 minutes when you decide). Any 58 / 80 mm Bluetooth thermal printer from a local supplier. Plug it in, open the assistant, say “Connect my thermal printer.” Pair, print a test receipt, done. See features for the supported list.

Barcode scanner (instant). Any USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner. USB scanners are recognised as keyboards — plug in, scan, the product comes up.

Second register (60 seconds). Open pos.trykaspa.com on another phone, sign in with the same phone number, you have two registers. Free, instant, sales sync.

Cash drawer (10 minutes). Wire it to the thermal printer’s RJ-11 / RJ-12 port. The drawer kicks open on cash sales.

Larger product import (5 minutes). Drop a CSV in the assistant whenever you have one ready. Even if you only had time to add 5 products tonight, you can do the full 800 SKUs over the weekend without redoing anything.

Returns and return slips (instant). Already configured by default. Process a return on the sell screen, the slip prints, customer comes back, slip is redeemed as credit.

Where this gets compared to other POS systems

A quick sanity check on the 10-minute claim. Most competitors:

• Square: app download → email signup → email verify → currency / locale setup → product setup → first sale. ~15–30 minutes.
• Loyverse: same shape. ~15–30 minutes.
• Shopify POS: requires a Shopify store first. ~30–60 minutes.
• Local paid POS bundle: scheduled installer visit, hardware setup, training session. Days, sometimes weeks.

Ten minutes is not a marketing number we made up. It is a deliberate engineering goal: the slowest step in your setup should be receiving an SMS. Everything else takes less than the SMS.

A note on what we did not do

We did not say “set up your store hours”. Kaspa does not care about store hours — the till is open when you say it is.

We did not say “set up your modifiers and variants”. Most small shops do not need modifiers. If you do (coffee with extra shot, sandwich with no onion), the assistant handles it in plain language — “Coffee has size options: regular 350, large 450”. You do not need a dedicated screen.

We did not say “configure your receipt template”. The default template prints shop name, items, prices, totals, tax, payment method, date, transaction ID. If you want a logo or a thank-you line, you can ask the assistant — but you do not need to.

We did not say “set up customers”. A “customer database” is overkill for most shops. Returns work with a printed slip, not a logged-in customer profile. If you genuinely want customer loyalty later (loyalty points, marketing list), the assistant can wire it up.

The 10-minute setup is short because we stripped out the steps that do not earn their place.

Try it tonight

The pitch ends where it started: open pos.trykaspa.com on your phone right now. Sign in with your number. Add three products. Ring up a test sale. If it took longer than ten minutes, tell us — we want to fix whatever was slow.

The first sale costs nothing. The next thousand sales cost nothing. See pricing for what is in the free tier. There is no upsell email coming.

That is the whole pitch.