Mountaintop POS — bank compatibility

Mountaintop POS is a point-of-sale system for pharmacy retail and retail. Forty years in Australian pharmacy and still independent — they claim the first Windows pharmacy POS in the country, and they owned a slice of the ordering gateway their own customers buy through.

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.

It handles split bills and cash out. Tyro rates it a Power Up partner.

Mountaintop Systems has been selling point of sale to Australian pharmacies since 1985, all of it locally developed, and says it was the first Australian pharmacy POS developer to ship a Windows system. Four decades inside one vertical is rare in this market, and rarer still without being bought — most of the pharmacy software names of that vintage have since been rolled into larger groups, Australian or foreign.

The part pharmacists tend not to know: Mountaintop was also a shareholder in PharmX, the electronic ordering and invoicing gateway that sits between pharmacies and their wholesalers, now listed as PharmX Technologies (ASX:PHX) after Corum Group bought out the remaining stake and renamed itself. A till vendor holding equity in the plumbing its own customers order stock through is an unusual position, and worth knowing about when you are weighing up who you buy from.

On the counter the Tyro integration covers purchases, refunds, cashout and split payments. Cashout is the one that matters in pharmacy, where a lot of stores still act as the de facto cash point for a shopping strip.