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Spicy: Open Source Restaurant Management System

Spicy is a restaurant management system. It handles the counter, the kitchen, the bar, your stock, your shifts, and your accounts. You can run it on a computer in your restaurant, or on a cloud server.

Where Spicy runs

Spicy is a server application. The server stores your data and does the work. Tills and back-office computers connect to it through a browser.

You can put the server in one of two places:

• Locally. The server runs on a computer in your restaurant. The tills reach it over your local network. Spicy needs no internet connection, and trading continues during an internet outage.
• In the cloud. The server runs at a hosting provider. Each till reaches it over the internet, so trading stops when the internet connection fails.

Spicy has no offline mode. A till that cannot reach the server cannot take orders.

Your sales figures, supplier details, and staff records stay on your server.

What Spicy does

• Point of sale. Cashiers take orders and payments at the counter. Food prints to the kitchen, drinks print to the bar.
• Stock. Spicy deducts drinks from stock automatically when the cashier sells them. At the end of the day, the kitchen counts food ingredients.
• Shifts and cash. The cashier opens a shift with a float. At the end, the cashier counts the drawer and Spicy shows what it expected against what the cashier counted.
• Accounting. Every sale writes balanced entries to a ledger. Spicy records food and drinks separately.
• Daily profit and loss. See your gross sales, your food and drink costs, your expenses, and your profit.
• Suppliers. Record what you received, what the supplier billed you, and what you still owe.
• Reports. See sales by day, item, staff member, service type, and hour. See the ledger, trial balance, and stock reports.

Who uses Spicy

Spicy has three roles. Each person sees only what they need.

• The cashier takes orders, sends them to the kitchen, takes payment, and closes their shift. The cashier sees the POS and nothing else.
• The manager runs the back office: menu, stock, shifts, orders, accounts, and reports. The manager also cancels orders and processes refunds.
• The administrator does everything a manager does. The administrator also creates accounts and assigns roles.

Setup explains how to create accounts and assign roles. Back office shows what a manager can access.

How Spicy works day to day

A normal day runs like this:

1. The cashier opens a shift and counts the float into the drawer.
2. Customers order. The cashier builds the order, sends it, and takes payment.
3. Food prints to the kitchen. Drinks print to the bar.
4. At closing time the cashier counts the drawer and compares it to what the system expected.
5. The kitchen counts how much rice, oil, and chicken it used.
6. The manager produces that day's profit and loss.

Steps 5 and 6 matter more than they look. Spicy records every drink sale, so drink costs are exact. Food costs are only as accurate as the kitchen's count. When a count is missing, Spicy warns you.

Getting started

Do these two steps in this order:

1. Install Spicy on your server, locally or in the cloud.
2. Set up your restaurant. Add your items, prices, payment methods, and stock.