Restaurant POS Live

An order arrives from somewhere else

Zomato, Swiggy, the outlet's own online menu — an order posted as JSON lands as a ticket, once, with unmapped items refused by name.

An aggregator's order used to be typed into the POS from the aggregator's own tablet, by a captain, during service. The receiving half is now built: an outlet gives each channel a secret, the channel posts the order, and it lands as a ticket with the channel's price.

What is done on arrival

The payload is stored whole before anything reads it, so a body that fails to parse is still there afterwards.
The sender's own reference makes the order idempotent — a retried delivery, and every aggregator retries, makes one ticket and not four.
Each of the channel's item ids is mapped to a dish; an unmapped item is refused naming the item, not silently dropped from the ticket.
The channel's own price for the dish is used, because the aggregator's menu is marked up on purpose.

What is not done

The product does not push the menu to the aggregator or accept an order on its behalf; that half is written from the aggregator's side, on their API, once a restaurant is connected. The receiving door works with anything that can post JSON today.

More on Restaurant POS

The restaurant POSTables across the top, the menu below, the open order down the right. Punch, fire the KOT, settle at the counter or send it to the room. KOTs and the kitchenA ticket per station, a modification the kitchen sees as a reprint, and a KOT the kitchen can hold — with the store drawn down on every fire. Tables, stewards and the floorThe table belongs to somebody. Steward-wise sales are answerable because the captain on the table is a fact, not the login on the till. Charge to the roomThe bill goes to the guest's folio in the same second, as a restaurant charge with its own tax — after the guest's name and room are matched. The bill and its GSTA numbered GST bill per outlet with HSN codes per line, the slab per dish, and service charge that is taxable because the law says so. Tenders and reversalsA tender is controlled — cash, card, UPI, on account, to the room, complimentary — and a bill that was wrong is reversed, not deleted. Cashier shifts and the outlet day endA shift opens with a float and closes with a count; the day end closes every open table, reads the tenders, and refuses to close a day still in the future. The menu, and a price that knows what time it isCategories, dishes, variants, a price per channel, and a schedule — happy hour is a window on the menu, not a second menu. A restaurant without a hotelThe POS sells on its own — an outlet that is a customer in its own right, with no booking chart, no room, and every till, bill and day end working. The kitchen storeUnits, locations, ingredients, recipes with yield loss, an append-only stock ledger, and consumption on every KOT — so the food that was used is a cost the day carries.