Brightpearl POS Review

It was founded by Chris Tanner and Andy Mulvenna in 2008. The company employs 100 people and serves more than 1,400 customers in 53 countries. Tanner and Mulvenna created Brightpearl to help retailers manage orders, inventory, and customers across multiple channels. Many of the reviews on Brightpearl’s Facebook page sing the software’s praises for being a solution well-tailored to small businesses.

Let’s take a look at the features and services to determine if Brightpearl is right for your business.

What You’ll Need

Brightpearl POS will work on touch screen tablets. To take credit cards through the POS system, you’ll need a PayPal account. If you’d prefer to use a different processing company, you can, but you won’t be able to automatically track payments as you can with integrated processing.

You can optionally choose to add accessories like printers and cash drawers. Brightpearl supports STAR TSP 654 and Star TSP 143 thermal receipt printers or an EPSON TMT88 series (Mark 4 only). Any cash drawer is compatible as long as it works with the printer, as it will need to connect to the back of the printer. Additionally, any keyword-wedge scanner will work as a barcode scanner, but the Brightpearl website recommends the Touch 65/90 handheld barcode scanner.

Brightpearl Features

As a tablet POS system, Brightpearl offers many handy point-of-sale functions with the convenience of a portable system. For sales and payments, Brightpearl gives you check out flexibility with configurable payment methods, integrated card payments, and store credit options. You can also configure which payment methods each store may use. Additionally, you can take advantage of features that include cash management, discounts, basket options, and an offline mode.  

Brightpearl offers this introduction video:

Before a sale is completed, cashiers can add existing or new customers for the sale. Additionally, Brightpearl offers customers the option to have the receipt sent to them without needing to be added to a customer list.

Cash Management

In addition to card acceptance, you can easily add a cash drawer for non-card payments. Brightpearl allows you the flexibility to add or remove cash from the cash drawer to pay store expenses. For mistakenly processed payments, cashiers can undo a cash payment.

Payment reports outline cash flow from each business day including all sales and refunds that were processed for that day.

Basket Options

To give cashiers the ability to quickly add products to a customer’s basket, Brightpearl offers product searchability by description, SKU, or barcode. The results show up on screen so you can quickly add them to the basket by touching the item. With a scanner connected, cashiers can quickly add a product to the basket by scanning a barcode instead.

Cashiers can be flexible to customers’ needs with Brightpearl’s hold and retrieve features. For example, if you need to serve a second customer in the middle of a transaction with the first customer, you can place the first customer’s transaction on hold. Then, another cashier can retrieve the order and take care of the first customer so no one is left waiting.

Discounts, Returns, and Store Credit

Brightpearl offers the ability to provide discounts at the time of checkout. You can choose to apply “line” discounts for specific items once the product is added, or basket discounts that apply to all products in the basket.

Customer returns are easily processed and store credit can be quickly awarded for future purchases. Brightpearl’s account sale feature lets the customer pay the full amount later while the deposit feature lets them pay a portion of the purchase price to be paid in full later.

Offline Functionality

Products and cashier data is held on your device so if there is no connection, you can still serve a customer. This is useful for trade shows and if the connection goes out.

In addition to the payment and customer features described above, Brightpearl offers a number of management functions, including user management, inventory management, and reporting functions.

User Management

With Brightpearl, you can set up employees with their relevant role, authorized discount level, and the store or stores with which they are associated. Depending on the role you choose (cashier or manager) you can control who has access to certain functions like discount approvals and cash management.

Inventory Management

Brightpearl’s product inventory feature allows you to see the available inventory across products or stores/warehouses. You can also control which store can view which inventory. You can also access additional product information, including description, price, SKU, barcode, category, and brand.

Reporting and Sales History

Brightpearl offers reporting across all business channels. You can view sales data by channel, product, and vendor. Also, insights on cash flow and inventory are integrated into the Brightpearl platform, as well as data on individual customers that are in your system.

Brightpearl’s sales history feature makes completed transactions searchable by receipt number or by customer. Once you find the completed transaction, you can reprint receipts or refund the transaction. Additionally, you can print gift receipts from a completed basket for specific products and quantities.

Brightpearl Software Pricing

Brightpearl’s pricing is flexible, offering varied cost structures depending on your business needs. While they don’t publish pricing directly on the website, they do list “Entry,” “High Growth,” “Established,” and “Brand Leader” packages. They base their pricing on how many locations you have, how much volume you generate in sales, the number of orders you do per month, the number of sales channels you have, and the amount of staff you employ.

We’ve reached out to Brightpearl for more information about the costs for POS software and will update this review as those details become available.

Pricing for Credit Card Processing

The Brightpearl POS integrates with PayPal Here, which accepts all major credit cards. There is a 2.7% fee for swiped credit card transactions using PayPal Here. Keyed transactions (where you manually enter the card information instead of swiping it) will incur higher fees.

If you work with another company for processing and choose not to integrate it through Brightpearl, that company will set your pricing.

Accessories

While Brightpearl does not sell accessories itself, its website recommends various brands and models of hardware for use with its system. You can, however, find comparable products that are also compatible with Brightpearl.