HOSPITALITY · 2022-2025
Restaurant ERP | Case Study
POS, inventory, recipe costing, procurement and multi-branch accounting for restaurant groups.
00 · CONTEXT
An end-to-end system for multi-branch restaurant groups: POS on the floor, inventory and recipe costing in the back, procurement and consolidated accounting at head office, across 70+ branches and 45K orders a day.
01 · PROBLEM
Multi-branch groups couldn't tell which outlet was profitable, inventory, sales and purchasing lived in different systems.
02 · STRATEGY
Anchor everything to the recipe. Once every dish has a costed bill of materials, sales instantly become margin data.
03 · DESIGN
A touch-first POS for the floor and a dense analytics console for head office, built from one component library.
04 · ENGINEERING
Offline-first POS with conflict-free sync, event-sourced inventory movements, and nightly consolidation jobs.
05 · CHALLENGES
No branch-level truth
Sales, inventory and purchasing lived in different systems, so nobody could say which outlet actually made money.
The network drops mid-service
A POS that stops when the internet does is not a POS.
Inventory drift
Stock counts diverged from reality within days, making food-cost numbers unusable.
06 · PROCESS
Every dish got a costed bill of materials. Once that existed, each sale automatically became margin data and each order became a stock movement.
Orders are written locally and synced with conflict-free merge rules, so service continues through outages and reconciles afterwards.
Stock is a ledger of movements, not a mutable number, making variance traceable to the shift that caused it.
Per-branch books roll up into group-level P&L overnight, with exceptions surfaced to head office in the morning.
07 · THE SOLUTION
- Touch POS with offline mode and shift management
- Recipe and bill-of-materials costing
- Purchase orders, supplier price tracking and GRN
- Event-sourced stock movements with variance reports
- Real-time per-branch P&L
- Central menu and price management across branches
08 · ARCHITECTURE
- React web console + Electron POS client
- Node.js services on PostgreSQL with event-sourced inventory
- Conflict-free sync layer for offline order capture
- Nightly consolidation and reporting jobs
09 · RESULTS
- 11% reduction in food cost within two quarters
- Real-time per-branch P&L
- Zero downtime service during network outages
10 · WHAT IT TAUGHT US
Costing the recipe was the unlock. Every report the group asked for later turned out to be a query on top of that one model.
11 · STACK
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