QR-Based Restaurant Ordering & Operations

Context

BOB Order is a cross-platform point-of-sale and operations platform built for small-to-midsized restaurants. Customers scan a QR code at their table and order directly from their phone. Staff see orders stream in real-time, fire them to the kitchen printer, handle payments, and close the till at end of day — all from the same app.

Jason co-founded and contributed to the engineering build-out as part of a small team, helping ship 136+ production builds across iOS, Android, and Web over two years.

Challenge

Restaurants in Perth needed modern QR-order technology, but the options were either:

• Global SaaS (Square, Toast) — priced and designed for US enterprise chains, not local AU/KR-style operations
• Legacy POS hardware — thousands in upfront cost, locked ecosystems, no self-order support
• Off-the-shelf QR apps — no cash management, no real-time kitchen display, no multi-store controls

BOB Order needed to be a full operations platform — not just an order-taking widget.

Solution

A single Flutter codebase delivers iOS, Android, and Web from one deploy, backed by Firebase for real-time sync and auth. Key subsystems:

• Ordering — QR table ordering, in-store cart, modifiers, multi-course flow
• Real-time kitchen — dashboard orders stream live; kitchen printer integration via local native plugins
• Payments — Stripe checkout + webhooks for online, cash/card split for in-store
• Cash management — shift open/close with cash balance transactions, rounded reconciliation, and audit trail
• Operations — opening hours synced from Google Calendar for holidays, staff bell call system, push notifications via FCM
• AI assist — OpenAI-powered features for menu translation and customer service copy

Results

• Running in production across multiple restaurants in Perth
• 136+ builds shipped with Crashlytics + Performance monitoring in place
• Fully self-hosted on Firebase — predictable per-restaurant cost, no per-seat licensing
• Source-available to Jason's partner restaurants, with handover docs and video walkthroughs

What SJSoftware can bring to your project

BOB Order proves the full SJSoftware approach on a real, demanding product:

• Complex domain (hospitality, cash, tax) shipped by a small team
• Cross-platform from day one without a separate mobile team
• Third-party integrations (Stripe, OpenAI, Google Calendar, FCM) wired cleanly
• Long-term maintenance with a calm release cadence (weekly builds for 2 years)

If your business needs that kind of breadth, we can have a working prototype in weeks, not quarters.