FRED POS PLUS — bank compatibility

FRED POS PLUS is a point-of-sale system for pharmacy, built by Fred IT Group. Started life in 1992 as NU Systems, once ran the dispensary in more than half the pharmacies in the country, and Telstra Health has been a major investor since 2013.

Certified on Linkly, running on premise. Linkly reaches more acquirers than any other middleware in the market, which is why most POS start there.

The Linkly integration runs on premise.

Fred IT Group was established in 1992, beginning as NU Systems Pty Ltd, set up by Paul Naismith and Rod Unmack. It calls itself Australia's largest dedicated IT provider to the pharmacy industry and says it is trusted by over 3,000 pharmacies. The original FRED product at one point ran in more than 50% of Australian pharmacies, which is about as dominant as vertical software gets in this country.

In 2013 Telstra Health became a major investor — a detail most pharmacists would not know, and one that matters because it ties a pharmacy's core software to a telco's health division rather than an independent software house. Fred's range splits into the dispensary side (Fred Dispense and Fred Dispense Plus) and the retail side, which is where POS Plus and Office Plus sit, handling the commercial end of the shop rather than the script.

The piece that makes Fred structurally important is eRx Script Exchange, established in 2009, which has been the provider of the National Prescription Delivery Service and the Active Script List since 2023. That is national plumbing, not a product feature. For EFTPOS the practical question in a pharmacy is always the same: the script and the front-of-shop sale often go through the one counter, so what you need to know is whether the terminal integrates with the retail POS, the dispensary, or both, and what the staff actually do when a customer buys a script and a bottle of shampoo together.

Fred IT Group also has FRED NXT and FRED POS.