Croma MNL
In productionSpecialty coffee retail
Everything a growing coffee company runs on — the POS, the stockroom, the payroll and a members' app — on one database that answers in 45 milliseconds.
One cafe, growing quickly, run out of a spreadsheet and a cash drawer. Sales were written down twice, stock ran out halfway through a shift, and payroll took an evening with a calculator. Even the receipt printer needed a paid app to work at all. The first system was built on spreadsheets too, and on a busy afternoon it dropped roughly one request in three.
The whole business now runs on Postgres in Singapore: screens answer in about 45 ms instead of two seconds, and not one request failed in testing. A sale rings up in seconds and its receipt prints itself. Stock counts down by ingredient, recipes suggest their own price, and payroll is something you check rather than something you do. Regulars top up store credit, pay for orders ahead and earn points on every visit.
What it does
The parts that matter to the owner
Ring up a sale, print a proper receipt
Every sale prints a BIR-style invoice on the thermal printer, with the VAT worked out to the centavo. The Android app drives the printer itself, so there is no paid printing app on every device.
Know what is low before a customer does
Stock comes down by ingredient as drinks are made, and voiding a sale puts the raw materials back. You learn you are nearly out of oat milk from a screen in the morning, not from a customer at two in the afternoon.
Recipes that price themselves
Each drink is costed from its recipe and the shop's running costs, and the system suggests a selling price at the margin you set.
Payroll that is already done
Shifts, hours and end-of-day readings feed straight into pay. What used to be an evening with a calculator is now a screen somebody checks and approves.
A members' app regulars actually use
Top up store credit in a tap, pay for an order ahead, scan to pay at the counter, and earn points on every visit — with Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers and WiFi codes as rewards.
Labels, designed and printed in-house
A label designer with QR codes, barcodes and dates, and batch printing from a spreadsheet, all printed straight from the POS.
Under the hood
How it is built to hold up
- database
- Postgres · Singapore, beside the API(shipped)
- response
- 45 ms median, measured from Manila(shipped)
- reliability
- 0 of 125 test calls failed · was ~1 in 3(shipped)
- migration
- 8,204 rows across 50 tables, checked before cutover(shipped)
- payments
- E-wallet and card top-ups through PayMongo(shipped)
- backups
- Nightly and off-site, with a tested restore(shipped)
Latest features
What is new in Croma MNL
An owners' schedule, hour by hour
The owners plot when they are at the café or available — one-off or as a weekly routine — and see for every open hour whether someone is there, with the gaps spelled out.
A buying list several owners can edit at once
Every edit is kept until it is saved or discarded, each line says who added it, and the database keeps every version.
Labels, designed and printed from the POS
A label designer with QR codes, barcodes and dates, plus batch printing from a spreadsheet — printed straight from the POS on the counter.
Screens
A look inside
Croma MNL started as one cafe in Manila and grew into five connected pieces that share one database: the point of sale on the counter, the admin panel behind it, a members’ app, the public website, and an Android app that drives the receipt printer directly.
The first version ran on Google Sheets, which was fine for one shop and became the limiting factor as the business grew. In August 2026 it moved onto Postgres in Singapore. Measured from Manila afterwards, the median response was 45 milliseconds against roughly two seconds before, and none of 125 test calls failed, where the old setup had been dropping about one in three on a bad afternoon. Ten workarounds that existed only to survive the spreadsheet were deleted, because the database now guarantees what they used to guard.
The printing app saved a running cost too. The printer previously needed a paid third-party print service on every device; building printing into the app itself removed the subscription entirely.