The Check and Posting Service (CAPS) is a required service that runs on-premises at the property. CAPS acts as the bridge between the Enterprise and the property, providing resiliency and increasing system performance. As workstation operators perform transactions and other operations on POS clients, CAPS stores the information and then posts in real-time to the Enterprise. Each property must have CAPS configured because without it, information occurring on the POS clients does not post to the Enterprise.
In the event of a WAN outage, POS clients are largely unaffected as they continue to post transactions to the on-premises CAPS. During a WAN outage, the Enterprise is inaccessible to the property; changes made in EMC are not reflected on POS clients, and Reporting and Analytics reports do not include the live transactions. Other systems and functions that rely on Enterprise connectivity are similarly impacted. When the WAN connection is restored, CAPS posts the information to the Enterprise.
CAPS also serves as the arbitrator of check sharing by maintaining a record of check ownership. This minimizes the likelihood of multiple POS clients having conflicting versions of a check.
Some properties perform a large volume of transactions that overwhelm the POS client workload. For these environments, it may be necessary to run CAPS on a PC with significantly more computing resources and disk space. The information in this chapter explains the variety of configuration methods for CAPS.