Datascape POS — bank compatibility

Datascape is a point-of-sale system for government, built by DATACOM. Not a shop till at all — it is cloud ERP for local councils, built from scratch by New Zealand's biggest IT firm.

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

The Linkly integration runs in the cloud.

Get the category right first, because this record sits in a POS directory and will mislead anyone skimming it. Datascape is a cloud-based software suite designed specifically for local councils, integrating rates, CRM, community engagement and regulatory compliance. Its modules are property and rates, building services, animal management, land management, licensing and permits, local laws, planning, accounts receivable and infringements. The payment integration exists because councils take card payments over a counter for rates, dog registrations and permits — not because anyone is scanning groceries.

It was built to replace something. Datacom had bought Ozone, a 1990s local-government ERP with fifteen council customers, and concluded it could not be moved to the cloud. So Datacom wrote Datascape from scratch as fully cloud native on Microsoft Azure with around 30,000 APIs: roughly fifty developers for four years, an investment Datacom's Mark Matijevic described as 'in eight digits'. Councils named as users include Porirua, City of Boroondara, Latrobe City, Central Coast Council in Tasmania, Wattle Range and the City of Greater Bendigo.

Datacom itself was founded in Christchurch in 1965 as Computer Bureau Ltd by two accountants, Dr Bernard Battersby and Paul Hargreaves, and is now one of the larger IT services groups in Australasia with offices across New Zealand, Australia and Asia. For a council comparing payment arrangements, the relevant point is that your software vendor is a large regional IT services company, not a POS specialist, and the counter payment piece is one module of a much bigger platform.