Flynn Townsend Case Study · Dispense

Case study · Dispense

Dispense · Banquets Bar Sales Tracker

A POS-style sales tracker running live at a 5-star Sydney hotel's banquet bars.

iPad running Dispense on a bar stand, Service Ledger open, EFTPOS terminal alongside
Live in service at Sofitel Sydney Wentworth. The terminal on its stand early in a function, Service Ledger open, beside the EFTPOS unit it has to reconcile against.
01 The problem

The problem

Banquet bar sales were tallied by hand. At the end of every function, the bar total had to be reconciled against the EFTPOS terminal's settlement printout and re-keyed into the hotel's MICROS POS. Slow, error-prone, and done at the end of a long shift.

02 The solution

The solution

An iPad-first web app (PWA) shaped around how a banquet bar shift actually runs: set up the night's bar before doors ("Mise en Place"), ring sales through service with a two-tap flow built for speed in the dark, then close with an end-of-day screen that reconciles card totals against the EFTPOS settlement and produces a MICROS-ready report. One tap to copy, no mental arithmetic at midnight.

Interactive

Sample data, nothing saved to a server. Best on a tablet or desktop.
Try the live demo
03 In the real world

This is not a portfolio mock-up. It is the tracker the bar actually runs on.

End of Service screen showing $985 across 37 transactions
End of a real service: 37 transactions, $985, split across Visa, Mastercard and AMEX.
Tracker showing a $13.00 sale held against the matching printed EFTPOS merchant copy
The reconciliation feature in use: tracker totals checked against the physical EFTPOS settlement slip at close.
04 Technical breakdown

Technical breakdown

  • Offline-first PWA

    Installs to the iPad home screen and keeps working with no network. Every mutation persists to localStorage, and a service worker caches the app shell so a dropped connection mid-service costs nothing.

  • Cloud sync with row-level security

    State syncs to a Supabase (Postgres) backend keyed by venue and terminal, so a replaced iPad resumes exactly where the old one stopped. The client ships only a publishable key, and row-level security policies scope it to a single table, so the browser can touch nothing else.

  • Tested core logic

    Report maths, preset resolution and the item×payment matrix live in a pure, DOM-free module exercised by a Node test suite. The numbers the hotel reconciles against are covered by tests.

  • Iterated in production

    Version 1 shipped and ran live; feedback from real shifts drove a ground-up redesign (Dispense): cleaner service flow, EFTPOS reconciliation, and the MICROS hand-off that removed the shift's most error-prone step.

  • Honest scale

    One venue, a handful of terminals, real users every function. Built, deployed and maintained solo alongside study and the job itself.