Troubleshooting StandAlone for LiquorPOS
Troubleshooting StandAlone for LiquorPOS. April 7, 2017 — The StandAlone feature in LiquorPOS has saved many a situation where a network or Server has failed. Not much goes wrong with it once you’ve set it up but when it does, it can be very frustrating to try and get your sales and quantities on hand updated. So, after a quick reminder about how to set up StandAlone just in case you don’t have this useful feature activated, I will review what can go wrong with StandAlone and how to fix it!
How do I set up StandAlone?
To make sure you can continue to run all your registers in the event of a network of Server failure you are going to want to make sure StandAlone is activated on each register. As only the sales functions work in StandAlone, there is no purpose in activating it on a purely administrative machine and the Server already has a dataset so it is not necessary to activate it there either. To turn on StandAlone (and you must have it activated BEFORE you have some sort of unfortunate event) on each register go to Edit/Customize/StandAlone and activate it there.
I like the choice offered where StandAlone asks if you want to update the directory each time you go into LiquorPOS. That way you can answer YES the first time each day and NO the rest of the day and save time. If you think folks will forget and to make sure you always have a fresh copy of the data, select the option to update the StandAlone directory each time you go into LiquorPOS. Click Apply to save your settings.
What can go wrong with StandAlone?
StandAlone error as you open LiquorPOS: If you get a LiquorPOS error when you try to open LiquorPOS and as it is copying to the StandAlone directory, chances are there is some corrupt file in that folder. While you could investigate to figure out which, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to delete the corrupt folder and let LiquorPOS create a fresh one. In the Windows File Explorer and on the C: drive you will see a folder called S_Alone. Delete it or rename it if deleting it makes you nervous. Go back and open LiquorPOS and you will see it create a new StandAlone folder and open the software! Note: You will want to take a quick look inside the S_Alone folder to make sure there are no drawer files you might not want deleted. These files begin with ‘drw’ and end with ‘.dbf’ — if you see any of these you might want to rename the folder rather than deleting it so those sales are preserved if it turns out they should have been merged.
Error merging sales from StandAlone: If you get a LiquorPOS error when you go to merge the StandAlone sales back into the main database, the most common issue is that the StandAlone directory contains more than one drawer file. This can happen quite easily if you are in StandAlone for several days or if someone has forgotten to merge or flush StandAlone sales in the past. To check this, in the Windows File Explorer open the C: drive and then open the S_Alone folder. You are looking for files that begin with drw and end with .dbf. If you find more than one such file you are going to want to look at the date stamps. If one or more of the files is old you may want to consider whether you actually want it merged or not as it will affect sales and inventory. If you see more than one drawer file that you do actually want to merge, you will need to copy out all but one into a different location as LiquorPOS can only process one drawer at a time. To merge the remaining drawer, go back into LiquorPOS and to File/Administration/StandAlone and merge. Then, one at a time, copy the extra drawers back into the S_Alone folder and in LiquorPOS merge them until each drawer you’d like merged is done.
Old sales in StandAlone file: When you go to merge from StandAlone, you see that the date of the first sale is not current. If there are sales which have been done in StandAlone but never merged, you may find yourself with a StandAlone drawer file that has sales from a prior occasion as well the the recent ones you actually want to merge. You can go ahead and merge the sales anyway keeping in mind that sales and inventory will be influenced by those sales. Or, if you do not want the old sales included, the drawer file will need to be edited before you perform the merge. This will probably require LiquorPOS Technical Support — or me 🙂 ! — to clean out the file, or split it so you can close the sales out for the proper days.
Can I create an icon to launch StandAlone?
StandAlone can also be used if you need to perform some maintenance on your server or during an equipment/software upgrade. You’ll need an icon on your desktop for that which you can create by right clicking on any blank spot on the Desktop, go down to New and left click on shortcut. Browse to the LiquorPOS folder on the C: drive and in that folder click on LiquorPOS.exe. The command line should appear as c:\LiquorPOS\liquorpos.exe. You are going to edit that line so that it becomes C:\LiquorPOS\LiquorPOS.exe /s to tell it to use the data in the StandAlone folder. Name the shortcut StandAlone and click Finish. I’d suggest you change the icon to something other than the standard button so as to prevent confusion and accidental use of the function.
StandAlone is a pretty useful, resilient feature and very little else causes any issue.
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