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Cost Wise
Offline-First Accounting App for Small Food Businesses
A mobile app that helps small business owners — cafes, food stalls, and small retail shops — track daily sales, expenses, inventory, and payroll entirely offline. It replaces the notebook-and-spreadsheet workflow with a guided, phone-first way to log a full day of business activity and see immediately whether the day was profitable, with no internet connection, computer, or accounting knowledge required.
User Roles
Owner / Admin
Full access to the business: sales and expense logging, inventory and recipe costing, employee and payroll management, day close, reports, and backup/restore.
Employee / Staff
PIN-based access scoped to daily operations — logging sales and expenses during a shift — without visibility into payroll or owner-level settings.
How It Works
Offline-First, Encrypted Local Storage
All data lives in an on-device SQLite database encrypted at rest with SQLCipher. Logging a sale, checking today's numbers, or closing the day never requires a network round-trip, making the app reliable even with spotty or no connectivity.
Quick Entry via Chat & Receipt OCR
Owners can log a sale or expense by typing or dictating a plain-language sentence (e.g. "sold 3 lattes and a croissant"), which the app parses and matches to existing products for confirmation. Paper receipts can be photographed and read on-device via OCR to auto-fill expense details.
Real Margins from Recipe Costing & Waste Tracking
Inventory stock levels and recipes are linked to products so a sale deducts real ingredient costs, and spoiled or wasted stock is recorded against true cost — keeping profit numbers grounded in what actually happened, not estimates.