One till. Eight trades.
The counter software we build everything else around: the till, the kitchen display, the admin panel and the API behind them. It was not written as a demo — it was lifted out of a system that had been running a real restaurant for months, with the floor plan, the GST, the refunds, the shift cash-up and around 1,700 tests still attached. Standing it up for a new business is a matter of filling in values, not editing code.
Because the rented ones charge you monthly for your own numbers
Most software sold to small businesses is rented, not owned. The price goes up, the feature you depend on moves to a costlier plan, your sales history sits in somebody else’s account, and leaving is made expensive on purpose.
Orca POS is the opposite trade. One deployment serves one business, and it is theirs. The code, the database and the hosting accounts are in your name from the first day. No other company’s data is in your tables and yours is not in theirs.
It is one system of record on the internet rather than a copy in every shop, which is a deliberate choice: there is no sync to get wrong, and no second version of the truth to reconcile at the end of a bad night. What that costs is spelled out below rather than glossed over.
One deployment, one business. Nobody else’s data in your tables, and yours in nobody else’s.
Pull the plug and see what actually happens.
The honest version, taken from the code rather than the brochure. Switch the connection off and watch what carries on, what waits, and the one thing that is refused on purpose — because pretending otherwise is how a cashier finds out with a customer standing in front of them.
Everything is green because the connection is up. Turn it off.
What the staff actually look at.
The table view below is redrawn from the product’s own design tokens, because no install is public. The rest are captures from a running system, and anything not here yet says so rather than being filled in with an invention.
Nothing in the shop is a server.
A Cloudflare Worker and a D1 database are the only system of record. The till, the kitchen display and the admin panel are all clients of it — including the kitchen, which is deliberately not a screen served by the counter PC. That is what lets the kitchen carry on when the till machine dies.
The one piece that has to be on-site is the print bridge, because a USB printer cannot be reached from anywhere else. It pulls work rather than being pushed to, so if that PC is off, bills still calculate and the paper comes out when it is back. The till also ships as an Electron application, so it installs like a normal Windows program and launches on boot.
One deployment serves one business. Pooling several into one database would be cheaper and we do not do it — your tables hold your rows and nobody else’s.
A walkthrough beats a screenshot.
We will screen-share the real install, on a real evening's data, and you can ask it awkward questions.