Centeria

Centeria is a restaurant order management system that I made together with an Italian friend and that is now running in several restaurants in Torino, Italy.

I’ve designed the architecture and written the code and my friend has gathered the business requirements and designed the UI.

Broadly speaking, the application allows to define a menu with various categories and products.

Then, restaurant rooms and tables are created.

After that, for each table, an order can be open and products can be added to that order. The waiters can use the computer on which the application is used to enter the orders or they can use palm devices (Android phones) to take the order at the table and then send it to the main application, acting as a server in this case.

Next step is to print the products to various kitchens in the restaurant. Once the customer orders for steak with fries and a beer, the order for the steak needs to go to the grill outside, the fries to the main kitchen inside and the beer, of course, to the bar.

Orders can be edited in any way, products can be canceled (in which case the kitchens need to be notified not to make that product anymore) and a large variety of menus, all you can eat and extras can be added and combine, to cover every necessities a restaurant might have.

In the end, the customers pay and a fiscal document is created. Everything is saved to the database and sent to the fiscal printers (lottery codes support included). Should the customer need, an electronic invoice can be generated in communication with fiscal authorities.

At the end of the day, the restaurant owner makes the fiscal closure and then he has various statistics at hand to see how much he has sold in that day, month or year (with different types of payment, cash, credit card, meal tickets, etc.) or which were the most successful dishes or even which waiter was the most diligent.

Going into the details, there is a (large) number of features that work together to satisfy each restaurant’s needs: operators, operator roles, meal tickets, vouchers, arranging tables inside a room to reflect their physical position in the restaurant, fully customizable fiscal documents, support for splitting bills or for ‘going Dutch’, clients database for easy issuing (and reissuing) of invoices, electronic invoicing, custom on screen keyboard. Plus a high degree of customization: language, documents format, colors, images, etc.