Orderlite — QR table ordering

The problem

A restaurant or cafe needs guests to order from the table without waiting for staff, and needs staff to run orders smoothly at the busiest hour. The familiar way — wave someone down, write it on paper, walk it to the kitchen — breaks exactly when it is busiest.

How it works

Orderlite is one web app serving many venues. A guest scans the QR code on the table, opens the web app, reads the menu and orders: nothing to install, no account, no online payment — they pay after the meal.

Staff and managers work from one realtime dashboard:

• A three-column Kanban board — New → In progress → Done — draggable, and updated the moment the kitchen finishes.
• Sold-out toggles on the product list; the menu on every guest's phone follows, with no page reload.
• Taking payment and closing the table session, including opening a table for a guest who did not scan.
• Revenue reporting and the best-selling items.

Prices are always computed on the server, never in the client: variants (size, toppings, sugar/ice level) can change the price, so the final number has exactly one place allowed to decide it.

A few decisions

• No online payment in the MVP. Cut deliberately, along with the receipt printer, a separate kitchen display and bill splitting — the schema does not block them, each is a table away.
• One visit, one invoice. A table session only closes by hand, so daily revenue is countable rather than inferred.
• Authorisation is per venue. Every query by an owner or staff member is confined to that venue, taken from the signed-in session rather than from a parameter the client sends.