SYM-PAC POS — bank compatibility

SYM-PAC is a point-of-sale system for retail. a Warragul firm that is now part of Constellation Software, the Canadian acquirer quietly buying up Australian vertical software.

Certified on mx51, which is the engine behind several banks’ own terminal offerings rather than something a merchant buys by name.

The integration covers phone and mail order.

The mx51 integration uses SPI .NET and was last certified in December 2018, on Windows.

Sympac has run out of Warragul, in Victoria's Gippsland, for more than 30 years, building connected business software for independent hardware, timber and rural retailers. The customer stories on its site are the likes of Permewans Mitre 10, Vibert's Mitre 10, Earl's Hardware and Crameri's Rural and Hardware — the sort of store where one system has to handle a trade account, a timber yard and a cash counter at the same time. Head office and the help desk are both in Warragul.

The part that is not on the front page: Sympac appears in the portfolio of Vela APX, and Vela Software Group describes itself as an operating group of Constellation Software Inc. Vela APX says it owns more than 30 mission-critical vertical market software businesses, and the Australian and New Zealand list is long — Tower Systems, Triquestra, Markinson, Surefire Systems, IT Visions, Independent Solutions, Beacon, Qdos, Apparel21, Fresh Computer Systems, Foresiight. Vela Software Group separately describes Sympac as ERP for timber, hardware and other retailers.

Vela's own words for what it does are that it "acquires, manages, and builds" these businesses, and in practice they keep their names and their teams. Sympac still answers its own phones in Warragul. The ownership is still worth knowing when you are lining Sympac up against Tower Systems or Surefire and assuming they are rivals.