Basil POS

Context

Basil POS is a point-of-sale platform for restaurants, spanning counter service, table service, retail and a back office. Its commercial hook is dual pricing — a cash/card price split that lets an operator run at effectively zero card processing fees. It ships as an Android POS app plus a web back office where owners manage menus, staff and reporting.

The problem

Restaurant POS software fails in a specific way: it is fast in a demo and slow at 7pm on a Friday. Every second between a cashier's tap and the screen responding is a second a customer is standing there.

On top of that, restaurant configuration is genuinely complex — modifier groups, seat-based ordering, tip rules, auto gratuity tiers, drive-thru flows — and all of it has to be editable by an owner who is not technical, at 2am, from their phone.

Engineering challenges

Speed is the feature. Menu loading and order entry cannot show a spinner. That pushes toward aggressive local caching, optimistic UI, and rendering that stays smooth on the low-end Android hardware restaurants actually buy.

Configuration without a manual. Auto gratuity with configurable tiers, applied either manually or by seat count, is a genuinely hard interface problem: enormous flexibility underneath, and an owner who needs to set it up in two minutes.

Outcome

Basil POS is live in restaurants, distributed on Google Play, with an active release cadence.