NeutronPOS - Run your small store with data driven insights.

Inspiration

Both of us worked at McDonald's serving checkout at the front counter in different countries; but we soon realised a common problem while brainstorming: During rush hour, rapid ordering (deleting, adding items, issuing refunds) took a while and for a new employee, this might annoy customers waiting in line as he/she figures out how to work the POS. We thought What if we make a POS app that helps you order items for the customer quickly and we later came up with adding performance metrics to help store owners improve efficiency (that is - staff allocation, menu-item ordering, finances etc.)

What it does

NeutronPOS acts as a Point-of-Sale software that comes as an Android/iOS/web-app. You can run it on tablets or iPads and it is even applicable for non-food businesses. Adding menu items, prices, sale-items / offers is just a few clicks away. You get visual store performance data through the app monitoring sales minute by minute. Furthermore, the software compares performance to previous week, month, year etc so you can better allocate resources.

How we built it

Our first prototype is a web-app. To make this, we used React (front-end UI), NodeJS + Express (Server-side) and Google Firebase's Firestore (database).

Challenges we ran into

There was a lots of challenges we ran into. Some of them we overcame and solved however we changed directions when some challenges were more time-demanding and we needed a prototype quickly. It was Noel's first time building a full-fledged web-app so it took some time to research and some playing around for the prototype to work barely. We had some trouble with the layout and the values from the database to actually show up on the screen but if we spend some more time we could get a working model (MVP) up and running.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Noel is immensely proud that he got to understand how to build a basic web-app from scratch to working with the database in a few days. Melanie had excellent leadership skills and with months of experience with web-frameworks it made our small team very cohesive.

What we learned

Our first ideas were to connect the POS with a kitchen display system. To achieve this we researched a ton about using web-sockets (Socket.io) however it was very time consuming for it to be implemented and required proficient experience with NodeJS. Even though it wasn't implemented we learned a lot about web sockets and how you can connect the POS to other functionalitites.

What's next for neutronPOS

We see NeutronPOS integrated with UberEats to measure store performance or we would like to work with another POS for our software to be integrated with.

Built With

• express.js
• firestore
• node.js
• react