Circle Software POS — bank compatibility

Circle Software is a point-of-sale system for books and retail. New Zealand's bookshop system — the majority of independent booksellers over there run on it, out of a team of seven.

Tyro only. Tyro is its own middleware and its own acquirer, so this one comes with the bank attached — moving bank means a new integration.

The integration covers split bills and cash out.

Circle Software has been going more than 15 years under founder and managing director Warwick Schaffer, operating from New Zealand. It is a deliberately small outfit: seven staff, backed by five shareholders who each founded significant local software companies in their own right, with Yikebike and Acclipse named among the companies in its orbit. That shareholder structure is unusual and worth knowing — it is not venture-funded and it has not been rolled up by anyone.

CirclePOS is cloud inventory built for bookstores and nothing else. It splits into independent booksellers, secondhand booksellers and groups or franchises, with secondhand-specific features like ISBN suffixes and AbeBooks integration that a generic retail POS simply does not have. Title data comes through Thorpe-Bowker and Nielsen feeds, accounting runs to Xero with a listing added in 2024, and EFTPOS runs through Tyro with cashout, refunds and split payments integrated. It also runs on Mac, which most Australian POS vendors still do not.

The market position is the headline: it is used by the majority of independent booksellers in New Zealand and a growing number in Australia. It also powers Bookhub.co.nz and Yourbookstore.io, which show shoppers in real time what is actually sitting on the shelf at local stores — a genuine advantage for an independent competing against online.